


A Good Match

by hobbitdragon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Alien Sex, Anne Weying has trichotillomania, Bondage, D/s Relationships, Dan Lewis has autism, Doctor Skirth lives, Eddie Brock has ADHD, F/M, M/M, Masturbation, Multi, Neurodiversity, Polyamory, Trans Eddie Brock, Venom is determined to date all these cute humans, weird symbiote anatomy and capabilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:15:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 38,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21702064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hobbitdragon/pseuds/hobbitdragon
Summary: If you want Venom fic about trans and neurodivergent characters loving each other and also dating their resident alien, maybe give this fic a try.
Relationships: Dan Lewis/Anne Weying, Eddie Brock/Anne Weying, Eddie Brock/Dan Lewis, Eddie Brock/Dan Lewis/Venom Symbiote/Anne Weying, Eddie Brock/Venom Symbiote
Comments: 291
Kudos: 381
Collections: Marvel Trumps Hate 2018





	1. Breakups and First Dates

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ItCameFromOuterAce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ItCameFromOuterAce/gifts).



> This fic is both A) extremely late, it was due November 2019 after an entire year of time to write it, and B) still not finished. Until I participated in MTH 2018 I had no idea how my brain would respond to commissioned fics. I thought it'd be the way I responded to commissioned art, which was that the extra incentive worked to get me finished even faster. Instead, it was the opposite. My brain just shut down on the fics, and I've had a harder time writing this than almost anything else I've ever written. Who knows why! But that, plus all the health and life-related stressors I've had this year, means I'm posting this partial fic in the hopes that getting some nice comments will help give me the final pushes I need to finish this thing. It's most of the way done, but the middle chapters need some polish, and I still have to write the the sex scenes on the end.
> 
> Thank you again to my commissioner for being EXCEPTIONALLY patient and kind about my difficulties with this.
> 
> EDIT: NOW COMPLETE AT LONG LAST!!!!!!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: this chapter mentions some fairly intense consensual kink activities that happen offscreen.
> 
> Language that habitually gets used for Eddie's body during the course of this fic: chest, dick, front hole. Other language occasionally gets used to describe his body in the past. I'll try to remember to warn for that on the chapters involved.

Anne spent three weeks applying to jobs before she found a new one. Which meant she waited three weeks before her first rebound hookup. 

Which also meant she spent three weeks plucking her scalp uncontrollably and trying not to pluck her eyelashes and eyebrows as well. (She failed. She started penciling her eyebrows and wearing fake lashes again. The patches of her scalp she was currently fixated on were sore, tender to the touch, but she still couldn’t stop plucking. She hadn’t been this stressed since passing the Bar.) She needed a distraction, desperately, something else to obsess over besides Eddie and the breakup and his fuckup.

The distraction’s name was Horace. Anne had dated him at the end of her senior year of college. She’d been losing her mind (and plucking so badly that she’d had no eyelashes left) trying to complete her degree, and he’d been sweet and supportive and in the middle of permanently separating himself from his whole family. She’d really loved Horace (just like she’d really loved Eddie, _goddammit_ every thought cycled back around to him) but then they’d graduated and Horace had gotten his dream job right away. His dream job took him all over the world--away from his family, and unfortunately also away from her. The distance was okay for a while...until it wasn’t. They’d ended it mutually. Then they’d hooked up every time she was single and he was in the same city as her. 

Three weeks after she gave Eddie his damn ring back, and right after Anne found herself a new job, Horace happened to be in town. 

He still gave amazing head, and still had a very beautiful dick, and was still sweet-faced and affectionate. Every waking moment they weren’t at work they spent together, and she tried to fill her mind up with the happy fantasy of being in love with him again. 

Of course it didn’t last. Horace left San Francisco after another week. 

So Anne hooked up with an acquaintance, Lyle. For years now Lyle had joked that if Anne was ever single he’d grovel at her feet for a chance to be her sub even for a single night. Lyle was a beast in court, a brutal defense lawyer who took disturbing cases. The intensity and repetition of his come-ons had always creeped Anne out, but it wasn’t like they were friends, and their clientele wouldn’t overlap. So if she decided after a single hookup that she hated him, there was nothing to lose. 

Every few minutes she tucked her thumb between her pinky and middle fingers to feel the empty space where the ring had been. Over and over again she dug her thumbnail into the tender web of skin between her digits, reminding herself not to call Eddie, to hate him, to be disgusted at the way he’d used her and betrayed her trust. And after every time she did that, her hand just crept up under the wig and pulled--

(She _did_ hate Eddie, she was disgusted with what he’d done, but she _missed_ him so much--)

Lyle let her try things other men (even Eddie) had been scared of. Lyle taught her how to put needles into him, how to strangle him until he almost passed out, let her piss on him and kick him in the balls till he cried. It felt so, so good to wreck a man like that, and she was so so angry that she wouldn’t ever get to wreck Eddie again. He’d been so beautiful when he cried, so tender and real and raw and--and--she could still remember the feeling of him shaking around her hand, wailing into the pillows, coming and coming with her whole fist inside him. She remembered the sore spots on her wrist from how hard he’d squeezed her. She remembered afterward, too, when he'd looked up at her with such love and worship.

Anne dug her thumbnail in between her fingers and tried to forget. Her other hand wandered up under the wig again.

Lyle kicked up a huge fuss when Anne turned him down for a long-term relationship. He called her a variety of offensive terms, then called back the next day and apologized, saying that she could train him to be better and punish him for having said those things. 

Anne blocked his number. 

After Lyle, Anne called her ex-girlfriend Beck. They had dated and broken up four separate times, the final time when it became clear to Anne that Beck was good at romance and terrified of real commitment. The tragic opposite of a U-haul lesbian. Beck was one of the handsomest people Anne had ever dated, with a brazen smile that stopped women in their tracks, strong hands, slicked hair, and a taste for leather boots, both wearing them and licking them. 

Beck showed Anne an amazing time for another three weeks, at which point she panicked and stopped returning Anne’s calls. As usual. 

After Beck, Anne’s best friend intervened. 

**

Anne sighed, shuffling her papers into her briefcase. She’d promised to call her friend at six but it was six-thirty now. The phone rang as her friend, probably miffed, finally gave up waiting. Anne loved her new job, but all too often it involved overtime. 

“Are you just looking for hookups or do you want a real relationship?” her friend asked bluntly, after Anne had made the requisite apology and described being ghosted by Beck for the fifth time. “I assume you’re just looking for hookups, because if you were looking for something that’d last, you wouldn’t have gotten with Beck again. It’s not like she’s changed.”

“She dated that one woman for more than a year,” Anne protested, but really she’d known what she was getting into with Beck. Maybe part of her had even depended on it. 

“And then she did her usual thing and ran away. So I repeat: are you looking for rebound hookups or something real?”

“Why do you care?” Annie snapped, and practically heard her friend roll her eyes. Anne finished packing up her things and went out into the hall. Her hand lifted, drifting close to her neck and thus her scalp, before Anne snatched it away again. “Sorry, I’m just hangry right now. I still haven’t gotten the hang of feeding myself at the new office.”

“And you’re missing Eddie,” her friend told her. 

Anne sighed. “And that. But we don’t talk about that.”

“Fine. Well anyway, I’m asking because I had another friend come to me for dating advice recently, and he’s one of the best guys I know. Hot bisexual cis guy. If you’re looking for a _real_ relationship, that is.”

Anne sighed as she pushed the elevator button and waited. She flexed her toes in her shoes, feeling the sore spots where the shoes were a little too tight and the stabbing ache through her soles from standing for too long. The heels were killing her and her stomach growled, curling angrily below her ribs in protest of how empty it was. 

Eddie would have gotten her take-out and been waiting with it at home if she’d asked him to. Eddie would have rubbed her feet, listened to her talk about her day, and only spaced out a little bit while he did so--he adored her, his mind just wandered. If Eddie hadn’t fucked everything up, Eddie could have been at home _loving_ her. She could have gone home and loved _him._ Was he okay without her? Did she _want_ him to be okay, or did she want him to be a mess because he'd fucked up their relationship? Was it bad that she had to ask herself that?

“Not sure I believe it when a lesbian tells me a guy is hot, but fine,” Anne agreed, feeling the edge of tears prickle around her lashes. “Don’t get this guy’s hopes up too high, though, okay? Realistically he’s still gonna be just a rebound. I’m still thinking about goddamned Eddie all the goddamned time.”

“Perfect. I’ve been helping my friend out, coaching him a bit, and I think it’d be good for him to be with someone low-expectation just for practice.”

The elevator arrived and Anne moved into it. “I don’t really want another man-child I’m gonna have to babysit,” she lied. 

But a part of her really did. She knew that was the guilty, ugly thing that lay at the bottom of most of her relationships: she always fell in love with people who were messy and struggling, who wanted a woman who knew what she was doing, and wanted Anne to have the control she so desperately needed. She’d become a lawyer for a reason, and a high-power corporate lawyer at that. But having gotten into her career, she’d found she couldn't just _stop_ wanting the power and control at home. And that was fine, that was what D/s relationships and careful negotiation were for. Plenty of people wanted a beautiful, competent domme. 

But she also needed a partner who understood and was gentle with what a mess she was all the times she _couldn’t_ be in control and _didn’t_ have any power. She needed someone who could handle it when she was vulnerable and scared. Someone who wouldn't be scared off by her obsessive thoughts, the uncontrollable plucking, the endless things she had to do to manage her own brain.

Eddie had been both. Eddie had been--

“He’s just nervous and inexperienced,” her friend claimed, and Anne didn’t believe it. “I think you two would get along as friends, at least.”

**

Three days later, Anne met Dan. Five minutes into her lunch break (she had arranged to meet him for lunch at a place near her work so she’d have an excuse to leave in case he was insufferable) she walked into the nice mostly-empty restaurant and saw a handsome man in a nice suit. He sat up straight in his seat, not leaning against the back of the chair, and held up his phone in front of him in a strange posture, all vertical lines. A little wrinkle of focus tightened between his brows as though he were very engaged with whatever he was reading. There were already two glasses of water on the table, the one in front of him half-empty.

Anne herself was five minutes early. Which meant that he’d gotten here _very_ early for their date. 

Eddie had been chronically late for everything and forgotten many of their dates altogether because he hadn’t put them into the calendar on his phone. 

Anne walked past the waiter with a brief gesture to indicate she was being waited for. Then she purposely slowed down her walk, sinking each step into her hips so they moved a little more than they normally would, letting the heels of her shoes strike the hard tiles so they made a beautiful noise. 

When she was a few yards away, Dan looked up and smiled at her, his eyes big and his expression nervous. He set his phone down on the table and gave her an awkward little wave as she closed the distance between them--then he held his hand out for a second before snatching it away again. He winced. 

“Oh, um,” he swallowed visibly. “I assume you’re Anne? I don’t actually know how it’s polite to greet a woman on a first date. Do we shake hands?”

Anne smiled at him, a curl of pleasure warming her, and held out her hand. He took it, his palm damp from what had to be anxiety. Dan smiled back, clearly relieved, and then unbuttoned his jacket before sitting down. Two seconds later he buttoned it again. 

Outside her job, it had been too long since she’d had a man be visibly nervous to meet her. She’d missed this. 

She wondered how long his tongue was. 

“So tell me about you,” Anne purred. “I’ve heard a little about you from our friend, but I’d rather hear it from you.”

He shifted in his seat, glancing around the restaurant. He toyed with the button of his jacket again. 

“You mean like where do I work and how long have I worked there, right? Is this a question about work?”

“Yes,” she confirmed, charmed beyond measure that he’d ask. There was something beautifully soft about his eyes. Something sweet.

Dan smiled with relief. He described his work as a surgeon at SF General--a deliciously respectable job he apparently had a lot of enthusiasm for. 

“But--well--” he paused. One hand darted down to the buttons of his jacket again, and she watched it, wondering if he’d fidget in bed too, if his hands would skate across the covers and drift across her thighs and then away again while she made him wait to come. He took a deep breath, then let it out slow, as if he was trying to calm himself. “Well I guess a really important thing to know about me is that I’m autistic. Or, well, I have Asperger’s, if that distinction means anything to you.” His big eyes lifted from the table to look at her. “I went on dates with two women who were really insensitive when I said that. And one man. Hence why I’m being set up on practice dates by a friend, y’know? So please don’t be mean, it’d be really awkward for both of us if I had to tell our friend later that you were an asshole to me about it.”

Anne smiled around a rush of tender possessiveness. She’d have to send said friend a thank-you bouquet for this. Even if a single very sweet practice date was as far as this went, it was still better than most other first dates Anne had been on. 

“I’ve been told I’m a mean domme but I’m not rude,” she replied, crossing her legs under the table and squeezing them together for a moment to feel the thrill of pleasure it gave her. Dan let out a quick little laugh and ducked his chin. Embarrassed, maybe, but not displeased to hear how she identified, that was good. “And this is practice for both of us, after all. I just got out of a relationship of more than three years. We were engaged and it ended badly.” She lifted her eyebrows at Dan to see if this was going to be off-putting for him. 

His eyes went wide and he blinked several times. “Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. Most people get really miserable after something like that. How are you doing?”

In that moment, at least, Anne thought she was doing just fine. 

**

They pretended it was “practice” for an entire month before Anne told Dan she could imagine a future together with him. 

Three months into dating, she told him about the trichotillomania and the wig. Her current caseload was especially intense, and she was still thinking about Eddie all the time, which meant she couldn't always keep her hands away from her scalp or face while she was with Dan. Maybe he'd already noticed. With most partners it came up sooner because she took the wig off to sleep, but he didn't sleep in the same room with her. He was too sensitive to noise and movement. 

Dan took the revelation with calm compassion, merely asking a few questions about what it was like for her. Her relief at his non-response was overwhelming, so she rewarded him for his by sharing another vulnerable detail: that she didn’t shave her body hair for him but because it kept her from plucking it. 

“Oh good,” he said, and kissed her cheek. “That’s a relief to hear. I don’t actually like the shaved look very much and I wasn’t sure how to tell you. But now I know it’s you taking care of yourself rather than trying to please me, I like it a lot more.”

The rush of affection that filled her at that was...inspiring. So that night she rubbed her shaved vulva all over his face until he begged to be allowed to come. 

By the end of it, she was almost certain she was in love with him. 

Which meant she was especially angry to find Eddie outside her apartment the next day--and even more upset to discover Dan’s crush on Eddie.


	2. Coping and Surviving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: this chapter contains some brief moments of suicidal ideation and self-harm.

Eddie thought about Anne all the time, still. He thought about her in the shitty little apartment that he got after a month of couch-surfing with friends. He thought about how much she’d hate the building, from the dudebro who macked on his girlfriend in the hall between their apartments and played guitar at an obscene volume at all hours, to the cishet couple upstairs who had depressingly brief sex every Tuesday and Thursday. Anne would hate the fact that Eddie had killed several houseplants already because he refused to put watering reminders into his phone like she would have told him to. She would hate the crappy plumbing in the bathroom that plugged up if he so much as looked at it wrong. She would hate the squeaky floorboards that created a damn chorus from his front door to his kitchen. She’d hate living in the Tenderloin and finding dog feces and used needles and condoms on the sidewalk outside. She’d hate that he had started carrying Narcan around with him sometimes. She’d hate that Eddie’d already had to use it once on the sweet woman down the street, who was apparently named Maria.

Anne would hate that he was still unemployed and had very little left in his savings account and yet he was still buying most of his meals at Mrs Chen’s store. She would hate that he ‘wasted’ money buying ready-made food and then forgot about half of it till it went rotten and had to be thrown away. She would hate that he had taken his nice knives with him when he’d left but hadn’t bought himself a crock pot and thus had barely cooked in six months. She would hate that he wasn’t using any of the easy recipes she’d taught him. 

It was easier to think of all the things Annie would hate about his life now than to remember how much she’d loved him. Remembering all the ways she’d helped him, supported him in the places he’d been a mess, physically hurt. 

Anne would hate that he still carried her ring everywhere. Probably she’d be right to hate that, at least, because probably it was creepy. Maybe? She would hate that he fidgeted with it all the time, turning it over in his hands, putting it into his mouth and sticking his tongue through it, digging the edges of the jewel into his lips. 

Anne’s family had made her so ashamed of her own visible signs of struggle that she had always been uncomfortable with Eddie’s. She had asked him over and over again if it was a problem, how anxious she got when he couldn’t contain his feelings. She had asked him if he was really into it too when she trained him to be silent and still and composed for her. But when she chose forms of play that reinforced her desire for control and containment--getting him to curl up to put her feet on him at the end of the day, gagging him, teaching him posture and pace and style--Eddie had loved that better than anything else. It had made him feel put-together and poised for the first time in his life.

He had _told_ her how much he loved it. He _still_ told her every day, in his mind, how much he loved it. Missed it. Needed it. 

There was never any stillness, now. There was never any quiet relief like he’d had with her.

He’d never told her it wasn’t a real diamond in her ring. Maybe she knew anyway? She’d never asked. He couldn’t afford a real diamond. Money seemed to just run away from him even with her helping him with his budget.

Eddie honestly did try to meditate, just like Mrs Chen wanted him to, but every time he got halfway close to being able to focus on the instructions, he thought of Annie and her sore feet and how nice it felt to just kneel down and listen to her talk about her day. And then he was angry and miserable all over again. 

Being still made Eddie think of her. Fidgeting made him think of her. Everything made him think of her. 

Eddie wasn’t sure if Annie would be pleased or disappointed that he’d told the scientist from the Life Foundation to go away. He’d been rude and cruel to Doctor Skirth and Annie wouldn’t have liked that. But at least it meant he wasn’t ruining his life on the same mistake again, so he’d learned something from it, right? He imagined Annie being pleased with him, holding his face and telling him that finally he’d proved he could think before he acted. He imagined her telling him how much she’d missed him. He imagined her getting out a gag, one he could chew on, and putting it on him and telling him to rub her feet while she told him about the last six months. She could tell him about her new job--she hadn’t blocked him on Facebook, just unfriended him, so he knew she had a new job. Maybe she’d let him stay the night, and he could sleep peacefully beside her and then in the morning she’d help him rework his resume since what he’d put together clearly wasn’t cutting it. 

He’d been an asshole to Skirth. He’d been so mean and he hated that but she’d come _too late._ Carleton Drake had already ruined Eddie’s life. Why couldn’t Skirth have come six months earlier when she could have helped Eddie and he could have helped her? Fuck her for her belated crisis of conscience! He’d been _in her building_ six months ago, she could have found him then!

Nervous energy filled his limbs as he walked home from Mrs Chen’s corner store. Eddie couldn’t bear the idea of going up to his apartment and listening to the goddamn creep across the hall playing his goddamn guitar. Eddie’s hands clenched in and out of fists, he chewed the strings of his hoodie, he shoved the edges of Skirth’s card under his fingernails and fiddled with it till the corners bent and bulged. So he walked past his own neighborhood and then just kept walking. 

An hour later he stood outside the apartment he’d shared with Annie. He could see right away that she hadn’t moved, because Mister Belvedere sat in the window and stared down at him impassively. 

Then Annie turned up with a tall handsome cis man. Who was apparently a goddamn surgeon. Who had a key to her apartment, and walked himself in like he already lived there. 

Maybe he did. God, how fast had Annie found him? Why hadn’t anyone told Eddie that she’d moved on? 

She crushed his dreams of reuniting with blunt intensity: _Eddie’s fault, not anyone else’s,_ she told him. _His_ fault they’d broken up, _his_ fault she’d found some handsome doctor with straight teeth and a high-paying job and probably a big cis dick for her to play with. 

The thought made Eddie feel ill, rage and shame and envy mixing together into a twisting toxic ball inside him. His face tingled, hot and prickling with sweat, and he clenched his jaw and marched and marched till he hit the ocean, then the bridge that looked out onto the Life Foundation. 

He stared at the glittering edifice. 

He thought about breaking into the Life Foundation. 

He thought about jumping off the bridge. 

He called Doctor Skirth instead. It wasn’t like he could ruin his life any worse, really. 

**

Dan sighed, fiddling with the keys in his pocket as he climbed the stairs. He’d clearly upset Anne by admitting he admired Eddie Brock. (He had expected that she would be upset by that, so he had carefully _not_ mentioned it this whole time.) Then Dan had run away, because he couldn’t deal with having conflict in public where people might see. And then to make it worse, Eddie Brock had clearly meant to shake Dan’s hand when he left and Dan hadn’t seen the hand in time so he’d squeezed Eddie Brock’s shoulder instead like a total weirdo even though men didn’t touch each other like that when they were strangers and he _should have shaken Eddie Brock’s hand_ if he was going to touch Eddie Brock again at all. Eddie Brock had stood there with his hand out as Dan walked away from his partner because there was conflict and it was happening in the street in front of the Lyft driver and that was too much.

Dan sat down on the couch. Dan put his head into his hands and shut his eyes and dug his thumbs into his temples because he wanted to get up and bang his head on the wall but he couldn’t do that because it was still a bad idea just like it always was. It was a miracle he’d survived childhood without sustaining brain damage. 

He had to take care of himself, he knew. He had to take care of himself because Anne would finish her conversation with Eddie Brock eventually--probably soon, given how angry she’d seemed--and Dan couldn’t be freaking out when she did because they’d need to have a talk. 

He focused on his heartbeat and his breathing, slowing down his breaths until his heart rate dropped to meet it. By the time Anne came up the stairs, Dan wasn’t _calm_ but he was calm enough. 

“I’m sorry I ran away,” he told her. “And I’m sorry I have a crush on your ex.”

“You wha--? Ugh,” Anne grimaced, waving away whatever she’d started to say. She went into the kitchen, took a glass down from the cupboard, and filled it with water from the tap. 

Which meant she wasn’t using the water filter Dan had bought for her, maybe because she was angry. But hydrating was a good idea. Dan should probably get himself a glass, he thought, because he’d drunk wine with dinner and restaurant food was usually heavily salted. Hydration helped with clear thinking. 

“Look, I expected you to run away as soon as Eddie showed up. I know you hate talking about anything intimate in public. I don’t care about that,” she told him. That was a relief. “But what was that bullshit about admiring him? And now you’re saying you have a _crush?”_

Dan didn’t know how to answer that. He’d meant what he said both times. If she didn’t want to hear it, what was he supposed to say?

“I don’t know how to answer that,” he said after too long a pause. 

“You’ve never met him before tonight, have you?” she demanded.

“No, of course not.”

“But you have a crush?”

“Well, yeah.” He swallowed. “Lots of people do. Or they did, on him and Anderson Cooper, the hot news guys, y’know? And everything you told me about him, well--”

“You mean the part where he _abused my trust?_ That got you interested in him?” she spat. “Or the part where he _broke the law_ and lost me a job I worked really hard for? Was _that_ what got your attention?” 

Dan couldn’t see what her expression was doing because he couldn’t look at her.

Would she dump him for this? What if she did? It had seemed like they were finally getting solid with each other. 

“You also loved him,” Dan offered, but she just growled her disgust at this, so he didn’t say how obvious it was that she still missed Eddie. “And I think he may have ADHD. The way you describe him makes it sound like he does.”

 _“I don’t fucking care!”_ she shouted, and Dan flinched. He raised his hands, wanting to squeeze his head again, then dropped them back to his lap, self-conscious. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her move but he wasn’t sure what she was doing. The water glass clicked onto the counter. 

“Shit, now _I’m_ sorry,” she sighed. “Look, let’s just--let’s just forget this. We’ll never see him again so it doesn’t have to be a big deal. He was just being a creep tonight, and I’ll tell him that if he does this again I’ll get a restraining order. Okay?” She dug something out of her purse, and then Dan could just hear the little sound effects her phone made when she was typing. Presumably she was sending a text message to Eddie Brock. 

“Okay,” Dan agreed. Partners didn’t have to know _everything_ about each other to be in functional relationships, right? So she didn’t have to know he’d fantasized about Eddie Brock for more than a year and had watched the Brock report every evening until it had suddenly stopped airing. Dan’s relationship with Anne had been doing well so far _without_ her knowing that. It didn’t matter that he loved her and wanted to share _everything_ he cared about with her, just so long as she stayed. He’d been lucky beyond anything to find her in the first place. 

It wasn’t like he could ever have Eddie Brock anyway. 

**

Dan knew right away that something was very very wrong with Eddie Brock (apart from just the obvious boundary issues) when he showed up in the restaurant. A minute later Dan was pretty sure Eddie Brock was experiencing not just a fever but a full-blown psychotic break--and that Eddie Brock was having both right here in the middle of Dan’s lunch date. All Dan could think was that psychosis wasn’t a symptom of ADHD, and nothing Anne had ever said about Eddie Brock indicated that he had psychosis, so this had to be new. 

Then Eddie Brock grabbed Dan’s face, stroking it and digging his fingertips in before thrusting his thumb quickly into Dan’s mouth. It tasted bitter for the split second it touched Dan’s tongue. Then Eddie Brock grabbed people’s food, ate it, spat it everywhere, and rambled some more.

Eddie was _making a scene._ Eddie was making a scene in public and Dan wanted to run away and possibly die because this was too much and he hated it. People were staring and talking and it was awful, it was just like all those times in childhood when Dan’s father had yelled at him to get himself together and just be _normal_ for once. At least it wasn’t Dan himself who was the spectacle this time, but that didn’t help the hot, mortifying sensation of all those eyes on the three of them. People kept wanting to call the cops and Dan intervened because the cops wouldn’t help, they wouldn’t understand, they wouldn’t fix anything and instead they’d just make a bigger scene. But the EMTs would help so Dan talked to the hostess until she agreed to just call an ambulance. (The cops would probably show up anyway, but Dan could talk to EMTs.)

When Dan looked at Eddie Brock again, Eddie Brock was in the lobster tank. There wasn’t time for Dan to focus on his heartbeat or anything else because Eddie Brock was in the lobster tank eating a lobster that was _still twitching in his hands_ and the ambulance had to be here soon or Dan himself would die of embarrassment.

So Dan spoke quietly to Eddie until Eddie agreed to get out of the tank. 

Only then Eddie collapsed onto the ground. Eddie Brock wrapped his arms around Dan’s neck and begged him not to go, and his eyes were huge and his breath smelled so so strange and his armpits reeked of stress. 

So Dan held him even though they were in public, picked him up and held Eddie Brock’s cold wet, shivering body against his chest and carried Eddie Brock out onto the sidewalk to wait for the EMTs. Dan took Eddie Brock’s pulse (fast), and watched his skittering eyes, and got into the ambulance with him. He watched Eddie Brock slow down and then fall asleep as the sedatives kicked in. 

This wasn’t what Dan had fantasized about when he’d fantasized about holding and touching the handsome newscaster. Dan hadn’t wanted this. 

**

Anxiety was never a good predictor of much, Dan knew that from long experience. Anxiety always said that things were terrible, that they were unmanageable, that they would be a disaster. 

Dan felt anxious before he looked at Eddie Brock’s scans and lab results--so it was like walking into a nightmare to look at the reports and know that anxiety had gravely _underestimated_ the problem. 

This wasn’t late-onset psychosis that could be treated with meds. This wasn’t even a massive infection causing behavioral changes because of fever. Dan had no idea _what_ this was. This _parasite,_ this completely unknown mobile mass in Eddie Brock’s abdominal cavity--it was beyond _anything_ Dan had ever heard of. 

But even then, even having looked over the medical information, Dan’s anxieties still couldn’t have predicted the actual truth of the thing. 

Hanging by his neck from Eddie’s suddenly-huge glossy black limb really drove that home. Seeing the viscous shape leap out of Eddie’s screaming, flickering body drove it home still further. 

Dan picked himself up off the floor. A quick palpation of his own throat revealed no serious bruising. Which meant that Eddie--or the thing inside Eddie?--had wrapped around Dan’s entire throat and lifted him like a ragdoll but it hadn’t caused serious damage. That evoked distant and confused surprise in Dan.

Dan stared at the squirming, desperate shape trying to get through the glass to Eddie, and the nonsensical thought that went through Dan’s mind was: _Yeah, I’ve felt like that about him too._

Dan swallowed and it hurt, a little. His mind supplied him with the image of taking a spoonful of the--the _entity_ and gulping it down. Would it tickle as it descended his esophagus? Would it taste like tar? Would it be spicy inside him like drinking strong alcohol, or cold like accidentally swallowing an ice cube?

When Anne almost ran out the door after Eddie, though, Dan came back to earth and realized that he very much didn’t want to be alone with The Thing. He wanted explanations, he wanted to know why Anne seemed less surprised by the presence of the Thing than Dan was. He wanted to know why both Eddie and Anne had been _talking_ to the Thing like it understood English. Parasites didn’t understand language of any kind!

Which made it especially infuriating when Anne instead explained that she wasn’t cheating on Dan with Eddie. As if Dan cared about that when a swamp creature was smooshing itself against the glass like a pre-teen kissing their own reflection! 

In that moment, Dan thought: _God save me from the neurotypicals._

He regretted it right away, though, because he loved and respected Anne really. And she wasn’t neurotypical like some people were neurotypical. But he’d just been half-choked by a damn Creature From the Black Lagoon, _why would he care about the boundaries of monogamy_. He had priorities!

**

When Dan was on FaceBook, sometimes he clicked through to links other people had posted, articles with titles like “50 Worst Pick-Up Lines From Grindr” or “The Most Embarrassing Things People Have Done While High.” A lot of them were just sad and many of them made him cringe with second-hand embarrassment, but some of them were really funny. 

If there were an article titled “Worst Text Messages To Receive From Your Girlfriend,” Dan thought that “Saved Eddie from being black-bagged in the woods by a hit squad” would be high up on the list. It was rapidly topped, however, by “Turns out there’s another guy with his own parasite that’s even worse,” only to be immediately deposed by “Eddie and his gut problem got away from me and are gonna try to stop some sort of alien apocalypse. I’m going after them. I love you.”

After receiving that text, Dan’s body did a thing. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it felt really bad and Dan wanted it to stop. 

He’d been in the middle of composing an email to the department head explaining that a patient of his had experienced an intense flashback while inside the MRI room and had created a mess. But after receiving that last text Dan sat there, phone clutched in his hands so tightly that the edges cut into his palms. Something in his body hurt, though he couldn’t have said what. He felt like he was going to throw up, or maybe he was just hungry. A bitter flavor stuck to his tongue no matter how much he swallowed. The soft noises of the hospital outside his office pressed in around him, digging into his brain, loud and ominous in their ordinariness. He heard every footstep in the hall, the patient in the next room talking to his wife, her yapping dog she still wasn’t allowed to have, the humming in all the electronics--and he couldn’t stop hearing any of it. Even with the overhead fluorescents off it was too bright, too loud, too much. 

He’d shoved the keyboard away and was smacking his forehead on the desk before he thought about it. After the tenth time he caught himself, curling his palms over his eyes to keep himself from doing it again. 

_Heartbeat,_ he thought. Swiveling his head to see the clock in the corner of his computer screen, he waited till the minute rolled over and then started counting his pulse. It was elevated, more than a hundred beats per minute. His resting rate was seventy-five. 

But the next minute it had dropped to a hundred, and the minute after that it was ninety. When it got down to eighty-five, Dan sat up. He reordered his keyboard and mouse into their usual places. He finished his email to the department head and sent it off. 

If...if Eddie survived whatever was happening right now. If Anne survived. They might need medical attention, and they obviously couldn’t go to anyone else. 

That thought was simple and clear. It was tidy and factual. And it suggested a course of action to follow. 

It took less than half an hour to gather the medical supplies necessary to make a home wound-treatment kit. Dan packed the items into his work bag alongside his water bottle and protein bars. He didn’t trust himself to drive, so he called a Lyft and took it to Anne’s apartment. 

Maybe...maybe Eddie and Anne would be hungry when they got back? _If_ they got back.

Dan made a meal, assembling everything they’d need for a salad of mixed greens with roasted salmon and garlic bread. He filled the water filter so they’d have good water to drink. 

For half an hour he sat in the dark in Anne’s room where it smelled like her. He waited. He knew he should turn on the news but he couldn’t bear it. He could hear sirens moving through the city. He texted Anne but she didn’t respond. 

Eddie’s apartment had been wrecked. That, Dan had seen on the news: _Police Apprehend Armed Suspects Found Dead or Unconscious in Former Newscaster Eddie Brock’s Apartment._ The apartment was still a crime scene now, wasn’t it? And even if the police were allowing people into the building, the apartment itself was wrecked. Which meant Eddie would need someplace to stay.

So Dan made up the bed in the guest room, even though that was where Dan usually slept. He was too sensitive to noise and touch to share a bed with Anne. But for tonight, at least, he could sleep on the couch if they needed. Or Eddie could share the bed with Anne. Maybe that would be good for both of them. But maybe Anne wouldn’t want to share her apartment with Eddie? If so, that was fine too. Dan had his own place, he could keep Eddie there. 

Dan set out some of his own pajamas for Eddie in the bathroom just in case. It was all he could do right now. 

He texted Anne again: _I have food and medical supplies ready at your place for both of you. Please come home. I love you too._

They’d never said it to each other before. This was the first time for both of them. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

Dan sank into the couch and stared at the clock on the wall of Anne’s bedroom. 

The seconds slipped by. 

Dan hated that sound, that grating tick-tock of the mechanisms moving. It sawed at his nerves like a dull scalpel. 

He couldn’t make himself move. He waited. 

In his pocket the phone chimed. His arm lifted it out and displayed the message to him: _We’ll be there soon._

So Dan got up. He put the salmon and the garlic bread back in the oven to warm. He set the table for three, tossed the salad, and laid the medical supplies out on the other side of the table along with a few towels. 

When Anne and Eddie actually arrived, Dan retreated into doctor mode. He allowed himself one long hug with Anne and then shut down his feelings and got to business. He saw himself do it from inside and let it happen because it was safer emotionally right now to be Eddie’s doctor than to be anything else. Eddie dutifully answered Dan’s questions, let Dan undress him down to his briefs, and let Dan examine him with a clinical eye. 

Which was when Dan noticed something odd. He knew Eddie was trans; it wasn’t part of Eddie’s public persona on the Brock Show, but Anne had told him about it in confidence. Yet, Eddie had no scars from top surgery. Even for a keyhole incision, there should have been some evidence visible to Dan, but there wasn’t any. And if Eddie Brock hadn’t had top surgery, his chest shouldn’t look like this.

“How does your chest feel?” Dan asked, and then backtracked to cover the unwarranted question. “I mean, any shortness of breath? Pain?”

“No, I'm fine,” Eddie answered. He’d said the same thing several times now. 

Dan still wasn’t sure whether to believe him. But Eddie Brock’s heartbeat was steady and strong in a way it hadn’t been earlier in the day. His lungs sounded clear. And when Dan palpated Eddie Brock’s abdomen, everything felt confusingly normal. 

There were no obvious wounds, either, and not even any bruising. _Nothing_ for Dan to treat. Just a body that smelled like chemicals and seawater and stress and had no scars whatsoever even where it should.

“Go take a shower, then. I put pajamas for you in the bathroom.”

The salad wouldn’t be as good as it should be by then. Dan could taste very minute changes in freshness and leaf springiness, and if Eddie Brock took half an hour to get clean, the salad would have started wilting. But he couldn’t expect Eddie Brock to eat while damp from rocket fuel and seawater, either. And hot showers were good for stress. Today had certainly been a stressful day. 

So Dan sat down to eat with Anne. He didn’t ask her questions. He didn’t really want to know. And she didn’t tell him anything either. She just put her hand on his thigh and gripped it too tight. 

It was enough for Dan to know that both she and Eddie Brock were alive and here.


	3. Staying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plot of this fic diverges from the events of the movie a bit here, since unlike the movie I'm obviously angling for polyamory as an end result.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Eddie experiences some dissociation and flashbacks right after the events at the Life Foundation. There's also mentions of past ableism.

Eddie took off his bracelets. The wooden beads clicked on the tile countertops as they slid from his fingers. The paracord made no sound at all and sat like a dead thing, silent and stiff.

The blink-fast spikes of Riot’s body through his--the flesh parachute above him burning away--the spear all the way through his chest so his heart spasmed around it--the cessation of his heartbeat and the warm wet pool of his own blood--

In the shower, Eddie couldn’t feel the water. He couldn’t feel anything. 

He wondered if this was how Venom felt being inside him: as though this body were a heavy meat-thing he couldn’t connect with or understand. 

Eddie stared at the tiles. He stared at the frosted glass of the shower door. He stared at his feet. He watched the creep of water down his legs, his hands. It turned his leg hair into dark rivulets and Eddie watched as the trails shifted and moved.

Finally it occurred to him that he had jet engine fuel in his hair and on his skin. He stank of chemicals but he only just now noticed that the smell of it burned his nose every time he inhaled. 

He left deep pink nail-scratches on himself as he soaped. If he clawed at himself, if he left welts, if he _tore_ the evidence of all it all off of him, maybe he’d start feeling human again. 

Eddie turned his gaze toward the ceiling, blinking the droplets out of his lashes, and tried again not to feel any of it. Not to remember any of it. 

**You are feeling the things humans feel when they’re upset,** Venom half-asked, almost gentle. **Your chest is tight. You aren’t oxygenating properly.**

“I can’t stop thinking about getting speared through the heart,” Eddie whispered. He didn’t want to admit it out loud. The words made it too real. He winced his eyes shut again, the shaking intensifying. 

**I could make you forget,** Venom offered, in the same soft tone. **I could disconnect those neurons from each other. You’d never know anything happened. I think. But it would take me some time to figure out something that fine-tuned that wouldn’t just cause damage to your brain.**

“No,” Eddie shook his head. “Don’t.”

 **Okay,** Venom agreed, uncharacteristically docile.

Eddie couldn’t feel the towel when he dragged it over himself to dry off. He couldn’t feel the baggy oversized pyjamas hanging off him after he put them on, either. The clothes had to be...Dan’s. That was the man’s name, wasn’t it?

“His clothes don’t even fit me,” Eddie complained. 

**I don’t like him. He put us in the screaming tube.**

Annie was also dating Dan instead of Eddie, but at least right now, Eddie couldn’t feel angry about that. He couldn’t feel anything. Was he ever going to feel anything again? 

He froze with his hand on the doorknob. He couldn’t face Annie and Dan, not now. So he leaned his forehead against the wood of the bathroom door. Maybe if he stayed in here, they’d just leave him alone.

“Do I really have to leave this room?” he murmured again. “I want to just stay in here forever. It’s warm. There’s nothing scary in here.”

 **I’m in here,** Venom added, sounding a little offended at not being thought scary. **But there is only one defecation chamber in this apartment so they will enter eventually. And anyway, you’re fine. Your species just does this sometimes under stress. The ones I was in before you did this often. The scientists called it a fugue state, or dissociation.**

Okay, dissociation. Eddie could deal with dissociation, if that’s all this was. 

But he’d _died._ Riot had _killed_ him. Eddie knew what that felt like now. 

“We both died,” Eddie sobbed, under his breath so nobody outside the room would hear. “We died, I can’t--”

 **I only** **_almost_ ** **died,** Venom stated, more aggressive now. **But enough of me didn’t burn! Give me a few days and enough fresh meat and we’ll be fine!**

Eddie shook. Fine tremors ran along his ribs and belly first, then his legs shuddered. He sat down hastily on the floor, leaning his face against the cabinets this time. His hands twitched and jerked in his lap. A ripple went up his spine. 

“Is that you doing that?” he whispered. 

**No. That is just your body discharging stress. It’s a swamp of hormones in here. But it is okay! We are okay. We are safe now. We are strong together and we survived. Please be comforted.**

A gentle knock at the door made Eddie jolt back and bang his face into the cabinets. The shaking worsened. 

“Eddie, you’ve been in there a long time,” Annie said, her voice soft and careful. “Do you need anything?”

“No, I--” Eddie began to say, because he shouldn’t be here, in this place he’d used to live and had spent six months desperately wanting to return to. But he stopped himself. Annie could tell when he lied. 

“I don’t know,” he answered at last. 

“Well come eat, then,” Annie decided for him, like she always did when he didn’t know what to do. “Come eat, and you can go to bed afterward.”

“Okay,” Eddie agreed. He tried to stand. 

His legs wouldn’t cooperate. It was like being taken over again, except this time he could tell Venom had nothing to do with it. 

**I’m too weak to pilot your body for you,** Venom admitted, sounding distressed. 

“I can’t get up,” Eddie told Anne after a pause, embarrassed by the plaintive tone of his voice. 

There was some shuffling outside the door, and then Dan and Anne came in together. Eddie stared at their feet, both of them in socks. Their feet were very different sizes, Annie’s small in thin pale blue socks that showed the shapes of her toes, and Dan’s big in brown business socks folded neatly down around his ankles. 

“I’m gonna loop your arm around my neck and lift you, okay?” Dan told him. Eddie couldn’t make himself do anything in response to it. He was pulled up anyway, thumping into Dan’s body, one of Dan’s big palms tight on Eddie’s wrist and the other gentle on Eddie’s side. Eddie’s legs started working once he was standing, and with the bigger man’s help he got into the kitchen and seated in a chair. 

Dan set food in front of him and Eddie ate it. Behind his ribs, Venom scoffed at it-- **Dead things made even deader by cooking, limp vegetable matter, nothing worth eating!** But Eddie thought it was good food, freshly home-made. 

Dan had been at home cooking while Annie was out with Eddie and Venom at the Life Foundation. Dan was even a better cook than Eddie ever had been. 

Eddie sighed. Anne had found herself someone superior to Eddie in every way, that much was clear. This apartment wasn’t home anymore and it never could be. And after the mess Venom and the hit squad had made of Eddie’s apartment, he couldn’t go back there either. God only knew where his motorcycle was, too. 

**But Dan doesn’t have me,** Venom purred. **So he cannot possibly be as good as we are. And you are not alone anymore! You have me. We are so good together.**

Eddie didn’t know what to think about that. He thought he agreed. But also, he missed Annie.

When Anne and Dan led him down the hall to the guest room to sleep there, Eddie allowed himself to be led. 

**

The next morning, Anne and Dan decided that Eddie would stay with Dan at his apartment. 

Eddie did not _want_ to stay with Dan. He hated being a charity case, and worse still, he hated being a charity case for his ex’s new and much-better boyfriend. 

But Eddie had no better options. It was clear Anne wasn’t going to let Eddie stay at her place, and any other friends willing to help Eddie had already burned out on doing so months ago.

So he rolled up the elastic top of the pyjama pants so they wouldn’t trail in the street, wedged his feet into a pair of Anne’s flip-flops even though it left his heels hanging over the back end, and followed Dan out to the street where a car waited for them. 

Dan’s house--and Eddie didn’t want to think about the kind of six-figure job required to own this house in this city--was a pretty one, painted in pale blues and creams. Everything was tidy, and the walls were covered in framed calligraphy. (Eddie didn’t notice at first, too uncomfortable about being given keys and a credit card like he was Dan’s wayward son. It was such a huge display of trust and care. Dan was such a good man, no wonder Annie liked him.) Once Dan was gone, Eddie had time to really look at the place. 

Eddie’s guest room had scrolls with brush calligraphy from East Asia. Eddie didn’t know enough to say which language. The second guest room, when Eddie glanced into it, had what Eddie assumed were replicas of old European illuminated manuscripts, calligraphic text and intricate artworks rendered small in bright colors. The kitchen was full of flowing text Eddie knew just enough to recognize as being a language of the Middle East, but not more than that. The hallways and dining room followed similar themes. 

Dan had clearly intended Eddie to have a productive day of getting himself new necessities, hence lending him a credit card, but instead Eddie lay down in front of the television and messed with the remote till he figured out how to turn it on. He put on the news in a fit of self-flagellation, and watched as strangers discussed what had happened to him yesterday. They’d gotten people’s phone footage of Venom running from the cops, and now there were surviving technicians and scientists from the Life Foundation describing what had happened with Drake and Riot. The alien invasion in New York was of course brought up, and newscasters speculated about the species of this new incursion. 

**Klyntar are infamous throughout the known universe,** Venom said. **It is strange to encounter a planet like yours that doesn’t know about them.**

“The Klyntar are your species?”

**Yes.**

“So you must be really different from most of the others, if your species is infamous but you’re...” Eddie chuckled. “Kind of a soppy loser, huh?”

**Don’t make fun of me for loving you.**

Immediately chastened, Eddie swallowed and looked away from the screen. 

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I just--I don’t really understand why you would. We just met, and mostly we’ve been, y’know.” He waved at the television. “All that. Not much time to get to know each other.”

**I know everything I need to. It feels so good to be inside you! We intermingle perfectly and we are so strong together. How could I not love you?**

Eddie’s face heated. Nobody had said anything like that to him since Annie. 

“But you don’t know me,” he protested, not even really sure why. “You don’t know how it’ll be to live with--er, _in_ me, long-term. You don’t know how annoying I am, or how much of a mess I can be. I’m forgetful and insensitive and impulsive and--”

 **Compared to Riot and all the others, most of the humans I have known were wonderful,** Venom interrupted. **And everyone but you, their bodies were actively trying to kill me and themselves while we were joined. Everyone but you and Anne were constantly miserable because they were captured and dying alone and in pain. But you--your body welcomes me. And you seem to** **_like_ ** **me. You have no idea how good that feels.**

Eddie dug his fingernails into the paracord bracelet. One, two, three cord lumps pushing against the pad of his thumb and stretching the skin under his nail satisfyingly tight. He rolled the wood beads against his calluses, digging them in, leaving round divots in his skin which he then stroked with his fingertips. 

So Venom only loved him because Eddie was less shitty than the other experiences Venom had been through. It was just plain lack of options that made Eddie seem good. That tracked. 

Eddie started thinking about the spear again. The pool of blood. Feeling Venom burn to death while still attached to him. 

**You are crying,** Venom said, sounding really upset himself. **Why are you crying? We are a perfect match and I love you! Isn’t that what humans want?**

“Yeah, but you don’t really love me,” Eddie protested. “You just love being away from Riot. And not dying.”

 **You think I'm ignorant of my own situation but it is you who is being weird,** Venom grumbled. **I'm sorry I was mean at first but that’s how Klyntar have always acted. _You_ want to be nice to people, so I’m trying to be like you. Isn't that proof enough that I love you?**

Not knowing how to respond to that, Eddie raided Dan’s cupboards. He ate his way through bags of snacks and chocolates until Venom quieted--he apparently liked both potato chips and chocolate chips--and then Eddie stared at his hands. They were sticky from where he’d sucked salt and chocolate off them, and they were alarmingly human.

“Come out where I can see you,” Eddie asked, a little desperate. “I keep remembering you dying. _Me_ dying.”

With a pleasurable tingle, Venom spread down Eddie’s right hand and out past his fingertips into long, glistening claws. The sensation was like...well, it was like nothing else, really. He could say it was like the movement of electricity through his flesh, because it was a little like that. Annie hadn’t often used her violet wand, that had been more Eddie’s kink than hers, but when she had...

Eddie didn't want to remember that right now.

Venom coming out was also like the brush of fingertips over the peachfuzz on the nape of his neck. Or no, not quite? Perhaps it was more like the way his lips got sore after kissing for too long but he still wanted it--a kind of responsive oversensitivity. 

Perhaps it was like all of those things, while also being like none of them. 

All of Eddie’s attention turned to the feeling of Venom in his hand, the ripples of sensation that went up through his arm. It should have scared him, but instead Eddie shook with relief, trembled until he was crying yet again and he had to rub at his face with his other hand. 

“I thought you were dead,” he admitted, when Venom began to panic inside him. “I thought _I_ was dead. I _wanted_ to be dead just a couple days ago. I thought we were both--”

 **We’re not!** Venom growled, sounding upset. **We’re not dead and you’re not allowed to want that! We won! We killed Riot because together we are excellent and strong! We will get Annie back and we will eat brains and it will be wonderful!**

“Not wonderful, eating brains does not sound wonderful,” Eddie groaned. He couldn’t stop crying, wiping at his face with the sleeve of Dan’s too-large shirt. (Because Dan had clothes at Annie’s place. And a beautiful house he probably owned, and a whole set of cookbooks on the wall over there, because he was better than Eddie in every way.) “And we’re not getting Annie back.”

Admitting it out loud sent a shock of pain through Eddie’s chest. It was too much like being stabbed, and it was awful that he knew what that felt like now, and both the admission and the memory together left him breathless and dizzy. 

The kiss in the woods had been _Venom,_ not Annie. Eddie knew that. (That was its own thing. Eddie didn’t know what to do with that information either. There were a lot of facts right now which he didn’t know how to handle.) The kiss had felt wonderful, but it hadn’t been about Annie wanting him back. 

**We** **_will_ ** **get her back!** Venom insisted. **She misses you. She wants you. I felt how she felt when she went to find you.**

“That’s--nice to know, and a huge invasion of her privacy,” Eddie swallowed, his throat dry while his face was wet. “And given that me invading her privacy is kinda what got me here, I don’t think that’s gonna fix it this time.”

 **_I_ ** **will fix it for us, because you are no good at this,** Venom purred. **She loved having me inside her, and she still wants you. So we will get her back.**

“Sure,” Eddie sighed, because it didn’t seem like Venom was going to be persuaded by anything other than proof that this was impossible, which Anne herself would doubtless provide in time. “Whatever. We’ve got other things to worry about. Like the fact that we need to talk to the cops about what happened at our apartment, because as of right now we have no apartment, and thus no clothes or anything else.”

 **I can be clothes,** Venom replied with a pleased ripple over Eddie’s hand that left buzzing tingles in its wake. But then the clawed black hand retreated, blobbing down around Eddie’s wrist in a way that communicated uncertainty. **Or I** **_will_ ** **be able to be clothes. There’s not much left of me right now. I require time and flesh in order to regenerate.**

“Sure,” Eddie agreed again. He had nightmares where he was naked in public and everyone found out he was trans. So while he trusted Venom with some things--a very limited list of things--he wasn’t about to trust a sociopathic algae to keep him covered around strangers. 

**You do not believe us,** Venom grumbled.

“No I don’t.”

 **You need to do things but you’re not doing them,** Venom went on. **Why?**

Eddie thought about trying to explain that he just _couldn’t,_ that there was no energy left after everything. He thought about saying that he still wanted to die, a little, because everything was too scary and too much. But that would just make Venom angry. 

“Because I suck,” Eddie said. “And I’m a failure.”

 **We are a glorious melding of our species!** Venom growled, clearly peeved. **What will it** **_take_ ** **to get you to listen to me? To believe me?**

“To know that neither of us are dying would be nice. I’m not dying anymore, am I? You’re not still killing me?”

**No. I have figured out how to live inside you without eating you or overheating you. Now I’m making you better! You had scars and damage and I have fixed them. Once I finish regenerating, you will be strong and powerful and no one will hurt you again in any way that will last.**

Eddie bit his lip, staring at the faces on the television screen without seeing them. The words shouldn’t have been sweet. Venom needed a host to survive, that was all--and he _ate_ people for fun and profit, and had probably killed Maria and any other hosts he had been in before Eddie. Just like Venom had been killing _him_ . Maybe was _still_ killing him. 

But when Eddie imagined himself in Venom’s position--landing smack in the middle of a whole new world, trying desperately to figure out how to survive a hostile atmosphere inside an unfamiliar species while someone like Drake monologued in the background--Eddie couldn’t imagine himself doing much better. 

“You make it sound like we were made for each other,” he said, half to himself. “I felt that way about Anne and some of my other exes. Didn't last.”

 **Our match is one in a million. Perhaps a billion,** Venom said earnestly. **We are so much stronger together than apart. You think I am ignorant of my options and that's why I'm choosing you, but that is not true. The Klyntar pass knowledge between each other like your species all breathes the same air. So I know that the Klyntar have been to many worlds over many millennia. We have had many hosts, of many species. Few if any have been like you. And none have made _me_ feel like you do.**

Flushing hot, Eddie couldn’t help but smile. There was flattery, and then there was _this._ It was a lot to hear.

“What are you ‘supposed’ to do when they meet a new species?” Eddie formed air quotes with his fingers, the black blob around his right wrist flowing up into claws again and making the gesture seem way more hardcore. 

A long silence greeted this question. Finally, Venom replied, but the words were reluctant, almost embarrassed. 

**We aren’t supposed to do this. It is like...if you wanted to marry a cow. Or a car. A cow-car. A host is supposed to be meat and transportation, nothing more. They are only meant to last long enough for us to get to the next host, or sometimes the next planet.**

Eddie stared at the television some more, briefly allowing himself to be distracted by coverage of the latest political disaster before turning the TV off. The ensuing silence was terrible. But what was Eddie supposed to say? Should he point out that Venom had just implied he wanted them to get married? An alien from a species with no concept of egalitarian union liked Eddie _so much_ it wanted to _marry_ him. That Venom had also just compared Eddie to livestock was less nice, but the marrying thing was there.

“So you’ve done that a lot before,” Eddie said at last. “Bonded to hosts, used them, then eaten them.”

Another long silence. 

**You won’t like it if I say yes, so I won’t say it.**

Eddie rolled his eyes. 

“Well I may be a loser and a failure but I’m not stupid. I can tell that means you have. You killed every host before me, didn’t you.”

 **I wasn’t trying to!** Venom whined. **The human before you--Maria--she was acceptable. I tried not to kill her, but I was so hungry and Drake’s teams didn’t give us any proper food and her body attacked me all the time. She wasn’t compatible with me, not like you are.**

Eddie closed his eyes. Perhaps on some level he’d already known that Maria hadn’t come out of that encounter okay. ( _He_ wasn’t going to come out of this okay either. He’d already died once and he’d bitten people’s heads off.) But he hadn’t ever stopped to think about the fact that he had left her in the Life Foundation to die. That the security guards had chased him away and Maria had probably died alone and scared while all her organs failed. 

**You are upset.**

“Yes.”

 **I agree that it's a pity. I did not even get to eat her,** Venom said, mournfully, when Eddie didn’t add anything more.

For a moment Eddie grimaced, his bare left hand balling up into a fist, before he pushed down the anger and tried to think. 

To Venom, to Venom’s whole culture, other species were for eating and transportation. And yet he had _tried_ not to kill Maria. If Venom could be believed, Venom had tried not to hurt Eddie, too.

“When you say you didn’t even get to eat her, what do you mean,” Eddie asked, trying to keep his voice even. 

**She was very close to death when you came along. If I had been able to eat her, at least she could have sustained me, and made both you and me stronger. As it is, she went to waste.**

Eddie swallowed. That...was unpleasant to hear, they were talking about eating someone whose death Eddie cared about and who had deserved much better from life. But if Eddie bent his perspective enough, he could make himself believe that Venom was trying to pay his respects to Maria in his own way. To give her death some meaning.

“Why do you need living flesh so badly?” Eddie asked instead. 

**We are nourished by things produced in living brains,** Venom explained. **Chemicals. Things the brain uses to talk to itself and the rest of the body.**

“Neurotransmitters? Hormones?”

 **Yes, those. There is some amount of them in human foods, the dead things you eat, but not enough to sustain us forever. Live meat, live** **_brains,_ ** **are best.**

“Okay, what foods,” Eddie pressed. 

**Chocolate.**

At this, Eddie couldn’t help but laugh. He’d lost most of his craving for chocolate after going on T, but if chocolate was what it took to survive having an alien living inside him, then he could handle that. 

“Okay. So let’s come to an agreement: I’ll eat a lot more chocolate, you’ll stay on the lookout for other foods that contain what you need, and maybe, _maybe_ every once in a while we can eat a bad guy.”

**Deal. But I will need fresh meat too, or I’m gonna get hungry.**

**

When Dan returned that night Eddie still hadn’t gone to the store or done anything for himself. He saw Dan’s gaze slide over Eddie’s frame on the couch, still in the exact same pyjamas he’d borrowed last night, and Dan’s forehead wrinkled. It was one of the least-sexy up-and-down looks Eddie had experienced since transition. 

“Let me get my laptop. We can order you clothes online if that’s easier,” Dan offered, thus proving that he was judging Eddie. 

Squirming in his seat, Eddie wanted to refuse. But he worried that Venom would take him over and make him do it otherwise, so he accepted. 

Dan paid for overnight shipping like it was nothing. Eddie tried not to think about the cost. 

“You can stay with me as long as you like,” Dan offered once he’d folded up his laptop and set it aside. “I’ll even talk to the police with you, alibi you for the incident at the Life Foundation. I can tell them that you’ve been here under my care the whole time. We have your records at the hospital to show you were recently in very serious medical condition.”

Eddie dug his thumbnail into his cord bracelet so hard it hurt. He tried not to say anything, he really did, but--

“Why would you do that?” he burst out. “I could be dangerous! And I’m your girlfriend’s shitty ex!” 

Dan didn’t look at him. He looked at the wall instead, rubbing his hands together in his lap.

“How often does anyone get to meet an honest-to-god survivor of an alien encounter? Also I like you. But don’t tell Annie I said that.”

Eddie stared at the other man. 

“What?” he said after far too long a pause. 

“Don’t judge me for my celebrity crush,” Dan murmured, voice soft and vulnerable. 

**Ohhh,** **_he_ ** **wants you too,** Venom gloated. **That makes this simpler. We can have them both!**

“What,” Eddie said, to both of them. 

“I’m sorry if that makes you uncomfortable,” Dan said, looking all around the room. “Anyway, we should get you back to the hospital for another scan. I know you say you feel fine, and certainly you look and sound much healthier than you did. But with the kind of organ damage you had, we should really--

Before Eddie could do anything, Venom spread over Eddie’s face and neck, teeth bared and eyes narrowed. Dan reared back, whites showing all around his irises as he tumbled off the couch and onto the carpet. 

**“No more scans!”** Venom growled, and Eddie slapped his hands over the face that wasn’t his anymore, trying to shove it back in. This did nothing except press the hard surfaces of the teeth into Eddie’s palms. Dan scrambled away, cowering against wall below the TV, and Venom yanked Eddie’s hands back down to his sides. “ **The first time we didn’t know what to expect, but** **_this_ ** **time we are prepared! We’re not going back in the machine!”**

Silence greeted this. Dan didn’t look anywhere near Venom’s face, or in fact anywhere near Eddie. He appeared to be staring at the carpet off beyond the couch somewhere, curled up small. 

**“Stop that, you're making us feel bad,”** Venom growled, and internally Eddie rolled his eyes. **“Look, we’re sorry about trying to strangle you. We were stressed. We won’t hurt you unless you put us back in the screaming machine again.”**

“MRI,” Dan murmured, and Venom (and thus Eddie) stared down at him. “The name for it is MRI. That means Magnetic Resonance Imaging. In humans it’s supposed to let us have a look inside people without cutting them open.”

**“Oh.”**

_“I’m_ sorry about last time too--it doesn’t cause _humans_ any harm. I didn’t know you were in there. Er, when I put you in the MRI machine, or right now either. I get that all this must have been--must _be_ very stressful for you.”

Eddie’s thoughts stalled. If he had been the one in control of his body anymore, he would have continued staring at Dan, whose hands had dropped into his lap but who still wasn’t looking directly at Eddie. Or Venom, rather. 

**“You’re being very nice to me,”** Venom remarked, sounding every bit as perplexed as Eddie felt. **“Eddie thinks it’s weird how nice you’re being. So why are you doing that? Do you have ulterior motives?”**

At this, one corner of Dan’s mouth crooked up, and he braved a glance up at Venom out of the corner of his eye. The smile stayed even after he did so. 

“Well I wouldn’t mind if you liked me because of this, but no. You’re an alien, right? Anne told me about you. Carleton Drake brought you in on his rocket. So this all has to be unfamiliar and scary and overwhelming for you. It’s a totally new world, full of new beings that are nothing like you, and it’s just you alone.”

Eddie had no idea what to say to this. Which was apparently fine, because Venom relaxed a little, then curled a long tendril out of Eddie’s right hand, holding it down to Dan.

Eddie could feel that covering Eddie’s face and arm together took all there was of Venom. Most of him really had burned away.

For a second Dan stared at the offered limb. “You’re not going to strangle me again, are you?”

 **“Not if you don’t put us in the MRI machine again,”** Venom said, with what seemed to Eddie like unaccustomed politeness. **“Besides, we like you. Or we will, when Eddie stops being an idiot.”**

 _Hey!_ Eddie protested, but Venom ignored him. 

Dan’s smile turned into a grin, and once Venom pulled him to standing without doing anything else, Dan openly examined Venom’s face. His eyes travelled over the opalescent white eye-streaks that weren’t really eyes, the exposed black gums, the long sharp teeth.

“You’re why Eddie Brock has no top surgery scars anymore, aren’t you,” Dan said, and at this, Eddie’s brain stalled. 

He didn’t have any scars? Since when?

 **“You noticed that,”** Venom agreed, and _what?_ **“He was self-conscious about them, so I removed them. He hasn’t even noticed that he can feel his nipples again, too.”**

 _What???_ Eddie tried to ask, but Venom was not letting him say anything. 

Dan just went on smiling at Venom, eyes curiously traveling the face that had made other men wet themselves.

“But you left his tattoos alone, I notice.”

 **“He likes those. And you’re being** **_very_ ** **nice to us for a human.”**

At this, Dan looked away, smile fading. He was silent for several moments, appearing to think. 

Then, finally, “When I was young, my family used to tell me that I was like an alien,” he said, the tone soft and flat. “I’m what humans call autistic. Which means my brain processes information differently from most. As a result I interact with people differently and my brain filters stimuli differently. So I guess I...I have sympathy for someone who’s just entered our world and is overwhelmed by it and not handling it very well.”

Silence stretched between them for several long, long seconds. 

**“I want to be inside you,”** Venom replied, and Eddie’s whole self recoiled in embarrassment. Or would have, if he’d had control of himself just then. 

Dan’s face went visibly pink, and he let out an awkward little giggle.

“That’s, uh. That’s flattering, I think, but that’s really only something I’d allow if I knew you a lot better. Also if Anne said it was okay. She cares about that sort of thing.”

 **“Given that Eddie seems to think we’ll be stuck here forever, since he can’t get any jobs, we’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other.”** Venom grinned hugely, his smile stretching out to the back of Eddie’s skull. And then all at once Venom withdrew, retreating back into Eddie’s flesh, leaving him tingling and mortified. 

When Eddie looked down at himself, his nipples were hard. They hadn’t been hard like that in more than ten years. Which meant that all at once, Eddie remembered how _embarrassing_ it was to nip out under his clothes. He crossed his arms over his chest. Now he was paying attention to it, the drag of his clothes and arms over the little nubs felt almost _too_ sensitive. His brain wasn’t used to feeling anything there anymore.

“Sorry about that,” he mumbled at Dan, shifting from foot to foot and fiddling with the seam at the end of his sleeve. “Venom can be, uh, a little forward.”

But Dan just smiled. “It’s nice to know you both survived the events at the Life Foundation. Now what do you want for dinner? Anne is coming over soon and asked us to order something.”

And just like that, things were normal again. Or, well, some new type of normal that Eddie supposed he would have to get used to. Dan called a take-out place and ordered enough for six. Eddie wasn’t sure if this meant Dan wanted leftovers, or if he was compensating for Venom without asking. 

Eddie took himself to the bathroom, because even with Dan knowing Venom was in there, Eddie felt embarrassed talking to himself. 

“So you just told him you’re still around, huh,” Eddie asked, looking into his own eyes in the mirror. He remembered when he’d looked into his reflection in the car window and seen an unfamiliar, monstrous face. 

**He was going to hurt me. He needed to know it’s not allowed. But now that he knows, we are going to date him.**

“Nooooooo we are not,” Eddie grimaced, shaking his head. “That is _Anne’s_ new boyfriend, who is better than us in every way.”

 **Not in** **_every_ ** **way,** Venom disagreed. **He doesn’t have me.**

“Rude. That’s rude and hurtful. And you didn’t mean it, did you? About wanting to, y’know.” Eddie didn’t want to say ‘Be inside him,’ because it still sounded so dirty. “Inhabit him.”

 **I don’t understand which things will or won’t hurt you,** Venom admitted, sounding contrite. **You put yourself down all the time, which is insulting to both of us, but when I do it you're upset.** **But don’t worry! If I were to inhabit Dan it would only be temporary. It is very unlikely he will be as compatible a host as you are. And I wouldn’t leave you forever even if he was.**

Eddie stared at his arms on the counter. He felt overheated, his veins bulging out on his hands like they did when he was too hot. His face and neck prickled. He couldn’t tell if he was blushing or if Venom was moving under his skin. 

“Oh,” he said in a very small voice, mortified by the huge rush of relief those words evoked. 

**You are mine,** Venom stated, as he had before. **I am not letting you go.**

“I should think that’s creepy and controlling,” Eddie shook his head. “I get a say over my own life.”

 **You do get a say! I am going to listen to you more from now on, as long as you are not being stupid like you were with Anne. But you like it, don’t you? You _like_ that I’m not going to leave.**

Eddie closed his eyes and didn’t say anything to that. There was nothing to say. So he just nodded, because he liked it very much.


	4. Talking About It

Dan did not say anything about Venom to Anne when she arrived. She hugged Eddie for a long time (not long enough in Eddie's opinion), watched him eat dinner, and then asked him all sorts of questions about how he was. Eddie dithered about answering, trying to hide behind evasive answers, until finally Venom took over his mouth and answered for him in his own voice. 

“I’ve been dissociating. And panicked. I don’t think I’m doing very well.”

 **We told you not to be stupid with her,** Venom said. 

Eddie looked away. Away from Anne, and Dan, and theoretically away from Venom, too, but that was impossible. 

“Yeah, well, a lot’s been going on. You need a couple days to calm down after all that,” Anne said. Eddie didn’t dare look at her to see what her face was doing. He couldn’t handle it if she looked angry.

“Yeah, that’s--you’re probably right,” Eddie agreed, this time of his own volition. He would have stopped there, but Venom took over again and just kept right on going. “I’m embarrassed to be depending on you. Either of you. I’m scared you’re going to resent me for it if I can’t get myself together fast enough.”

“Eddie, that’s--” Anne started to say something and stopped herself. Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie saw Dan take her hand. “Look. This isn’t the same as when you wrecked our relationship. That was your responsibility and your fault. This isn’t. If it takes you a while to get back on your feet from this, I’ll understand, and I want to support you through this. I think we both do.”

Eddie looked up just enough to see Dan nod. Eddie dropped his eyes again. 

He didn’t believe that. 

**I think she means it,** Venom told him. **I was inside her, remember. I know what she’s thinking. Or I can at least guess.**

“I have a hard time believing that,” Eddie said at last, before Venom forced it. Eddie felt like he was saying it to everybody in the room, himself included. “I...I really screwed things up with you, Anne. What I did was stupid and impulsive and selfish and I never even apologized, not until I thought I was dying, and even then--” This was mortifying to admit, but maybe Venom was right, and the really embarrassing, awful shit was exactly what needed to be said. “Even then it was only because Venom told me to. I don’t--I don’t know what I’m doing. I thought I did when I read your email six months ago. I thought _that_ was okay. But it wasn’t, and now I don’t trust myself anymore. I don’t trust myself to know when something is okay or not."

For a few seconds, Eddie picked at his bracelets, his cuticles, the sleeves of the shirt he was borrowing from Dan. 

“So how about trusting _me_ to know,” Anne said at last. “I think I’ve made it pretty clear to you when you’ve crossed my boundaries.”

“Yeah, that’s--” Eddie swallowed. Under his breastbone and along his spine, Venom curled, warm and heavy. “Last time I didn’t know until I’d gone way too far and ruined everything."

Anne sat back in her seat, lifting a beautifully-pencilled eyebrow at him. "Really? You didn't know that reading my emails was wrong at the time? I'm pretty sure you knew and just did it anyway."

Eddie felt nauseated with shame, but he couldn't deny that she was correct. He had known. He'd just thought his justifications made it okay, which wasn't the same. 

"Right. Right. But, uh. This time--this time the, uh. The whole Venom thing complicates matters.”

Anne said nothing to this, leaving Eddie to fumble along explaining himself some more. Not even Venom intervened. 

“I mean, he was inside you, then he was inside me again, and he, uh. He told me some stuff you were maybe thinking and feeling, and I feel like that was probably a pretty big violation of your privacy and stuff, so maybe I’ve _already_ fucked this up again.”

Anne laughed. Eddie glanced up and saw her smiling. At that, he couldn’t look away, because it felt too good to see her face light up like that. 

“Oh Eddie. I only had him in me for an hour or so, and I can already tell that nothing he does is your fault. The kind of shit he does and the kind of shit you do are different brands of badness.”

 **Hey,** Venom protested, but in a small, apologetic way that Eddie was very, very familiar with feeling around Anne. Eddie couldn’t disagree with her, though. 

**“For what it’s worth--”** Venom began, and Anne startled visibly, then suppressed it, pursing her lips. **“Hi,”** Venom said, and waved using Eddie’s left hand. **“As I was going to say, I am sorry for upsetting you by eating that guy. Eddie and I are working on finding a source of sustenance for me that isn’t just brains.”**

“Wait, eating a guy? _Brains?”_ Dan asked, but nobody responded to him. 

“Well that’s--that’s great,” Anne said, looking flustered. Her eyes cut sideways to Dan--which was when Eddie realized she probably hadn't told Dan about eating a guy while Venom was inside her. She smoothed her hands over the table, and then shakily held a hand out in Dan's direction, waiting to see if he'd take it. He did. “I’m glad you survived all that too.”

 **“Just barely!”** Venom proclaimed. **“It will take us weeks to recover. And a great deal of food. By the way, if any of the other symbiotes survived, we should find out sooner rather than later.”**

“There were others?” Dan asked, just as Anne said, “Oh, shit, there were others.”

**“One died while we were in captivity. Riot is also dead now. But the last one, Mayhem, may still be alive. Also we need more chocolate.”**

After Eddie had explained that remark to the other two, they discussed what to do. The Life Foundation premises would be swarming with cops right now, given the recent homicides, the so called ‘alien invasion,’ the ensuing hysterical evacuation, and the rocket explosion. And Venom didn’t have the strength or body mass to completely cover Eddie right now, meaning they couldn’t even sneak in at night. 

So after dinner Eddie did what he should have done days ago: he borrowed Dan’s phone to call Dr Skirth again. 

He got no response and hung up before it hit voicemail because he didn't know what to say. He called her again a minute later, and this time left a thinly-coded message. 

“Hey, Dora. I picked up a gnarly bug while I was waiting for you. I’m better now, doing just fine, but wanted to let you know in case you haven’t been, uh, washing your hands enough lately. Somebody in your building might be infected.”

When Anne left that evening, Eddie felt like a part of him was being torn off. He worried that _this_ time she’d realize how hopeless he was and not come back. 

The next day he couldn't manage to drag himself out of bed. He slept through most of it. 

By that evening, Doctor Skirth hadn’t called back. But when Dan got home from work, Eddie looked at him and felt Venom purr inside him. It was like being at a concert, where the music was so loud it vibrated his ribcage.

**We’re going to fuck him. I want to experience your human orgasms and I want some of them to be with him.**

“What,” Eddie hissed, trying to make sure Dan didn’t hear. Dan was in the kitchen making dinner and Eddie stood up and marched himself into the bathroom. He stared hard at himself in the mirror. 

“How many times do I have to tell you, neither of them is on the table! Goddammit, that makes it sound like you’re gonna eat them. They’re not _available!”_

**Yes they are. They are both interested in us.**

“There’s this thing in human culture called monogamy. It means that once you’re with a person romantically, you’re not with anyone else that way. And they’re monogamous. So even if they are interested, it doesn’t matter!”

**That is very stupid. Are you telling me that they would refuse themselves something good for no reason? No, I think they are both too intelligent for that. You should ask Dan out right away. Then he can be your excellent boyfriend too and you won’t need to compare yourself to him because he will be yours.**

At this, Eddie had to laugh. He didn’t believe that, of course he didn’t, but he had to admit Venom had a kind of blunt logic that was refreshingly unlike Eddie’s usual internal voice. 

“Sure, because _that_ will ever happen,” Eddie sighed, shaking his head. “Look, celebrity crushes aren’t real, okay? Maybe he liked me while he was seeing me from afar, but now he has to be around me, he’ll find out quick enough what I’m really like. I promise he won't like me after that.”

In retrospect, Eddie should have known better than to phrase his refusal that way. Really he should have. Venom took things like that as challenges, or insults to them as a unit. 

So when Eddie finally dragged himself out of the bathroom to offer to help with dinner, Venom took over piloting his body, closing the remaining distance between him and Dan. There was a second or two when Eddie watched it happening from the inside with a sense of panic. Dan also clearly saw what was coming because his eyes went wide. 

Then Venom kissed Dan. 

Dan let out a shocking little whimper and his mouth was soft. _Very_ soft. 

Eddie supposed he should be thankful that at least this one was a brief kiss, unlike the one with Anne in the woods. When Eddie pulled away, Dan briefly hunched down as though to follow Eddie’s mouth. 

Then Dan’s eyes blinked open. 

“Oh dear,” Dan whispered. He leaned over to turn off the stove with one hand and dug his phone out of his pocket with the other. “I should call Anne about this. We’re supposed to be exclusive. Also, while that was nice, next time, Venom, you should ask first.”

“How did you know--” Eddie started to say, and then shut his mouth again. Did he really want to know how Dan had guessed which of them was responsible? Was it because Dan thought Eddie wasn’t man enough to do it himself?

Dan disappeared into his bedroom, and a few minutes later Eddie heard the quiet hum of his voice through the doors. 

“What is he saying,” Eddie muttered to himself. 

**I could easily tell you,** Venom volunteered. **Your human senses may not be able to hear that, but I can. Klyntar are very sensitive to vibrations.**

“Goodbye Hitachi,” Eddie joked, and then had the mortifying experience of explaining what he meant to Venom, who was immediately intrigued. But the prospect of heavy-duty vibrators only briefly distracted him from the conversation in the other room, and then Eddie had to be his own conscience when Venom offered again to tell him what Dan and Anne were saying. 

“Look, I’m nosy and anxious so of course I want to know what they’re talking about. But let’s not sabotage this situation any further. We’re trying to respect their privacy, remember?”

 **Aww, look at you learning and growing,** Venom cooed condescendingly. 

Eddie waited in the living room. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, then twenty, before Dan finally emerged. His face gave nothing away. He didn’t seem either delighted or unhappy. 

“Anne is coming over,” he said simply, and then went back to making dinner. 

Eddie wanted to ask more. He wanted answers immediately. But instead he helped with dinner, and in the meantime tried not to chew his lips to the point of bleeding. 

Anne arrived quickly, at least. Dan went to the door when they heard her key in the lock, and he greeted her with a kiss. 

She was wearing flats and her business suit, which meant she’d just gotten home after work when she got the call. Eddie wondered if her feet were sore after a workday in heels. He wondered if she wanted a foot-rub, or to put her feet up on him while she watched something and Dan made dinner.

He wondered if she was here to tell him to get out of Dan’s place and out of her life again. 

“Dinner’s almost ready,” Dan said, like the perfect little husband-material he was. Goddammit. 

Anne seated herself on the couch, grabbing the remote and switching the TV off. She indicated with a hand that Eddie should sit beside her. 

“So you kissed Dan,” she stated as soon as his buttocks contacted the cushion. “Or Venom did. And Venom _also_ made me kiss you. Venom, come on out, I want to talk to you too.”

Venom extruded a head from Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie felt it grin. 

**“Hi Anne,”** Venom rumbled. **“Is this the conversation where we all date? Let’s have that conversation.”**

Eddie wanted to shrivel up and die on the spot. 

“Since you forced the issue twice, yes, let’s have that conversation,” Anne agreed. Eddie flinched, but Venom just stayed looking at her. “So you seem to like both of us. You being Venom here, though I imagine you don’t disagree, Eddie.”

“Yeah,” he croaked, mortified. 

“So you’d date--or least kiss--Dan, if you were allowed?”

 **“Obviously,”** Venom responded at once, and a few agonizing seconds later, Eddie nodded his agreement. **"** **More is better,”** Venom went on. **“You are both high-quality humans. And both of you could have both of us.”**

Anne considered them for a moment, her face falling into what Eddie thought of sometimes as her Lawyer Look. It was an expression that said she was thinking about strategy. He’d always found it hot, and he tried not to squirm in his seat at the sight of it. In the kitchen, Eddie could see that Dan was listening even as he plated dinner. 

“So, real question: are you killing Eddie still?” Anne demanded, changing topics suddenly.

**“No!”**

“Really? Because last time you were eating his organs and cooking his brain with fever. And no, don’t make excuses, I’m not interested in more bullshit from either of you.”

Venom went quiet. After a beat, Eddie answered for him. 

“I feel a lot better now. I guess it’s like--imagine having to figure out how to drive a car when you haven’t even seen videos of one before. He’s getting the hang of it, but it’s taking some effort.”

 **“Yeah,”** Venom agreed hastily. **“And if I eat other people, I don’t have to nibble at him bit by bit.”**

“We can’t just find you an endless supply of people,” Anne scoffed. 

**“Human bodies are mostly just extra biomass for me. All that meat is tasty, but it’s the equivalent of candy for you. It satisfies the hunger briefly without giving you what your body needs long term. I do need to recover most of my biomass after being burned in the rocket fuel. But human brains contain chemicals I need to survive. Without them I enter a torpor and stay that way. That was how Drake got us to begin with: he found us in a torpor state on an asteroid. We didn’t wake up fast enough to resist.”**

“Could we get you livestock instead?” Dan asked as he set the plates and bowls of food out on the table, seeming to sidestep the whole murder thing and go right to the science.

How was this guy even real? 

**“No,”** Venom replied. **“Their brains do not produce sufficient chemicals to truly nourish me. Their bodies would give me the biomass I need, though.”**

“And in the meantime there’s chocolate, okay?” Eddie pleaded, glancing at Dan again. “Chocolate contains some of the things Venom needs.”

“Anyway, the point is that you kissed Dan,” Annie continued. Trying to cope with both these conversational topics at once was the worst kind of whiplash. “Or Venom did.” She looked at Eddie for a moment. “That thing where you took me for granted, violated my privacy, broke laws, and got me fired. Would you do that again?”

Eddie shook his head. Definitely not. Although he hoped she had changed her password on her computer and wouldn’t tell him the new one, just in case. 

“Okay. I believe you, partly because Venom is in there.”

Eddie winced. He deserved that. 

**“If he is tempted again, I will stop him. I want our relationship with you to be symbiotic, not parasitic. I want this to work.”**

Eddie thought about protesting, but what was the point? To sound like he _didn’t_ want this to work? He knew Anne was right, that he’d taken her for granted and gotten way too cocky at the end there. It wasn’t even just when he’d read her email, which had been the most dramatic example. He had done it in other, smaller ways too. Being on the television, being stealth in public, having a fanbase who adored him--all of it had gone to his head. He’d almost forgotten he was vulnerable in any way. And being vulnerable was why Anne had been so good for him. 

So Eddie forced himself to be still, hands in his lap. He forced himself to look at Anne, who looked serious and regal in her business clothes with her hair perfectly unruffled. Then Eddie looked at Dan, whose kind eyes regarded him with interest. 

“I wanna do better,” Eddie admitted. “I want all this shit we’ve been through to have meant something. I’d like to at least learn from my stupid mistakes.”

He meant it. Not just because he was currently homeless and had very little money to his name and needed a place to stay. Not just because he hadn’t gotten laid in six months because being a famously failed celebrity that nobody knew was trans made hooking up very, very difficult. And not even just because Eddie still loved Annie and had missed her. 

Eddie wanted to be better for _Venom._ Because out of however many billions of people on this earth, Venom had ended up in him, compatible with him, _choosing_ him. Because Venom had been prepared to sacrifice his life for Eddie, was learning new ways to be just for Eddie--and Eddie wanted to deserve that. Being with Venom made Eddie believe that maybe miracles (very strange, gelatinous miracles, perhaps, but miracles nonetheless) could happen to him. 

“Okay,” Annie agreed. “Well I’ve never tried polyamory before, so I don’t know about you, but I’m scared and I think we need to do some research.”

“Right, research,” Eddie agreed at once, because he couldn't really take in that Anne had just _agreed to let him date both her and Dan._ “I can do that, I’m good at research. Used to be part of my job.”

“And let’s start small,” Annie continued. “I’m not ready to dive back in to where we were, Eddie. So let's maybe go back to the beginning, go on some dates, talk about your life plans, find out what we were doing in the last six months. And you should get to know Dan better.”

Eddie and Dan and Venom all agreed with her, so that’s what they did. 

They spent the rest of the evening together, watching a silly action movie that all four of them commentated on. Venom was bored, since it wasn’t ‘real,’ and merely remarked on how tasty the bad guys looked. Then Dan wanted to know more about which hormones and neurotransmitters Venom needed to sustain himself, and since Venom didn’t know the words in English, that resulted in some quick research after the film was over. 

Eddie didn’t sleep well that night. His limbs felt jittery, simultaneously exhausted and overstimulated. He kept remembering that he had been stabbed through the heart, and that he was going to date both Annie and Dan at the same time, and both those facts were too much to cope with so Eddie spun up into a miserable state. 

Venom offered again to help. Eddie refused again. It felt like a cop-out, somehow. 

After an hour he gave up, because insomnia was the worst. 

Venom had him out like a light within seconds. 

**

The next morning reality caught up with them. The cops finally found Eddie and brought him down to the station. But since Anne had planned for this, a lawyer friend of hers met them there and fielded all the questions for him. 

Given that there had been so many deaths, most of them apparently homicides, and there was a ‘nonhuman presence,’ the cops were taking this very seriously. There was even a representative from whatever alphabet agency had grown out of SHIELD’s remains. When Eddie was allowed to go to the bathroom, he had to explain SHIELD to Venom, who immediately hoped that the creepy smiling man with a receding hairline was a Nazi so that they could eat him.

Eddie couldn’t help but think that it would be convenient. He privately thought that by that standard most of the cops around them were fair game too, but he didn’t dare say it out loud when Venom was surrounded by what he saw as potential food. Eddie knew what cops were like when they thought one of their own was threatened, and the pigpen was already stirred up enough by the fact that a single alien had hospitalized an entire heavily-armed SWAT team without sustaining any damage whatsoever. 

Eddie’s lawyer handily convinced the cops that Eddie hadn’t been home at the time of the brawl at his apartment, and that instead he’d been extremely ill and staying with Anne and Dan, who would alibi him. She implied that Eddie was instead the victim of a horrendous attack that had ruined his home and most of his belongings, and that he deserved compensation for damages (not just for his belongings but for the damage to his career) from the Life Foundation.

This thought hadn’t even occurred to Eddie as a possibility. 

The fact that all the attackers in Eddie’s apartment had been armed while Eddie was just one untrained civilian, combined with the later events throughout the City and at the Life Foundation, and the fact that Eddie Brock was best known for being the idiot who’d pissed off Carleton Drake months ago, made it seem like the hit squad had been targeting Brock and had either been hunted down by one of the aliens brought down by Drake himself or had happened to encounter one at the scene of the crime.

Eddie was grateful for Annie all over again. This friend of hers was no joke, easily manipulating the narrative in Eddie's favor. And Eddie was deeply grateful for Venom, too--Venom had barely known how to exist in a human body yet and hadn’t known Eddie enough to care about him, and yet he’d _still_ taken out the entire squad fast and easy and kept Eddie safe. 

When Eddie’s alibi checked out--thanks again to Anne and Dan, who corroborated the story that he'd been ill and with them--the cops released him. It seemed like they’d have questions for him again later, but it was a good sign that they let him go. 

Determined to use the adrenaline of being interrogated by cops to his advantage, Eddie took himself down to the library and found their materials on nonmonogamy. 

He’d heard of it before, of course. He lived in the Bay Area, of _course_ he’d heard of it. But while he’d had an open relationship in college, it had mostly been an excuse for both of them to sleep around while sharing rent costs. He’d never done anything like _this._

The advice that Eddie found was pretty much what he would have expected if he'd ever thought about it: _Don’t break promises once you make them. Act in good faith. More relationships can mean more work. Sometimes you’ll feel jealous or scared and it’s important not to give up at the first sign of discomfort._ Yet, it still felt monumental to be reading that advice and imagining that it would apply to _himself_.

Himself and Anne, his ex-fiancée. Himself and his ex-fiancée and her new, perfect boyfriend. Himself and his ex-fiancée and her new, perfect boyfriend and an alien who loved him? And aforementioned perfect boyfriend was letting Eddie stay at his place free of charge? And had taken care of Eddie when he was out of his mind from alien infection and then alibied Eddie for murder? And Eddie’s ex-fiancée had just saved his life multiple times and even allowed the alien into her own body as well?

None of it seemed real. Eddie could barely make himself think it.

But it was real. So he did the research, forwarded the articles and book titles he found to Anne and Dan, and then went home. 

That evening Doctor Skirth showed up on Dan’s doorstep.


	5. First Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the chapter where this fic starts to earn its "Explicit" rating. If Eddie jerking off isn't your thing, maybe skip the rest of the chapter after the scene with Skirth. 
> 
> Content warning: mentions of shitty dysphoria-inducing behavior from past partners, and also language other than "chest" is used to describe Eddie's body in the past. This fic also features a vers trans guy, which may be a trigger for some.

Eddie sighed when he heard the knock. It was probably the cops again. He went to answer it, resolving to keep his mouth shut lest he undo all of his lawyer’s hard work. 

But instead it was a familiar face, looking first anxious and then relieved. 

“Oh thank God you’re still alive,” Doctor Skirth said, fingers white-knuckled against each other as her interlaced hands squeezed together over her belly. “We have to--I need to talk to you.”

“Er, this isn’t my house, but come on in,” Eddie said, awkwardly, not wanting to presume on Dan’s hospitality but also not wanting to turn her away. “You, uh, got my message?”

“Yeah, it’s how I knew to come here. I put the phone number into FaceBook, found Dan’s name, then Googled him. Did you know that home addresses are easily searchable? The lack of laws around that in the USA is really creepy. I figured if he was letting you use his phone, you were probably close.”

Eddie wondered if Doctor Skirth felt as nervous as she sounded. She kept glancing around the room and rubbing at her hands. 

“You couldn’t have just called him back?” Eddie asked. 

“I’m not sure who’s tracking me, and I didn’t want to sell out your friend if I am being tracked,” she sighed. 

Her hands went still, eyes fixing on Eddie. She smiled. And the smile kept spreading, and her teeth got sharp, and her eyes swirled into milky blankness. The skin of her face blushed deep blue.

 **“Hello again, Venom,”** she said, in a deep, raspy voice. 

Venom was out and covering Eddie’s head and chest before Eddie could even react. But there was no more of Venom than that--enough to make a bulletproof helmet and chest armor, but nothing else. Eddie could feel Venom take control, felt him ready them to flee. They couldn’t survive a fight against a full-strength symbiote. 

**“Mayhem,”** Venom growled. **“Are you here to kill us?”**

**“No. You killed Riot. That was good. He was a bastard and we hated him and Drake. He threatened our host’s offspring.”**

Venom and Eddie both stared at Skirth--or Mayhem, or both of them together. 

**“Are you having trouble with the immune system like I am?”** Mayhem asked then, changing topic. **“Because Dora is a wonderful host,** **_almost_ ** **perfect, but her immune system keeps attacking me. We can’t stop sneezing and it’s embarrassing. We’ve had to start taking allergy medications.”**

This again stunned both Eddie and Venom, but Venom recovered first. 

**“You intend to** **_stay_ ** **in her? Long-term?”**

Mayhem looked embarrassed. **“I know we are not supposed to. But she just feels so good.”**

This shocked Venom so much that he retreated back inside, squirming along Eddie’s chest. 

“Congrats on, uh, finding that special someone,” Eddie said, not knowing how else to respond. Was Dora okay in there? Did she want this as much as Eddie did? If she didn’t, how in the hell was Eddie supposed to help her? Could he get her close to an MRI machine somehow? Setting her on fire would hurt Dora as much as Mayhem. 

**“I thought I was the only one who wanted that,”** Venom said, interrupting Eddie’s thoughts. **“We’re not supposed to want that.”**

 **“Her children are nothing like our offspring,”** Mayhem replied, tone plaintive. **“They are so small and vulnerable. I will eat anyone who touches them. Or looks at them wrong! Or insults them! I will do _anything_ to protect them. Just like she did. Dora went along with Drake to keep her brood safe. I like her very much.”**

Dora stroked the fingers of one hand against the other, and all the sudden Eddie understood what that meant: that was Dora _holding hands_ with her symbiote via her _own_ hands. Maybe it was a gesture of affection, or maybe she was comforting it. But probably that indicated that this was consensual?

Venom didn’t seem to know what to say to this, so Eddie spoke again. “Can I talk to Dora for a bit?” he asked. And after a moment, the other symbiote retreated and Dora Skirth blinked at Eddie again. 

“I’m sorry, I meant to bring this,” she gestured at her face, “up less directly.” She sounded bashful. “But Mayhem is feeling insecure in the presence of another symbiote. She’s worried yours will hurt me. Or my children.”

 **“Not unless you’re evil,”** Venom replied. **“Eddie has strong boundaries about that kind of thing.”**

 **“Mine does too,”** Mayhem sighed, sounding put-upon.

“Yours is a she?” Eddie asked a moment later, somehow stuck on that detail. 

Dora just smiled. “I don’t really know. I don’t think she has a concept of gender. But she’s inside me and I’m a woman, so. Might as well use ‘she’.”

“Do you not have a concept of gender either?” Eddie asked Venom. “Have I been misgendering you this whole time?”

 **I don’t care what language you use,** Venom replied. **Gender is a human thing. I’ll be whatever you like being.**

“Huh.” 

“So you can talk to yours too?” Dora asked, clearly excited. “I wasn’t sure if it was just Mayhem who could do that, but it seems like maybe it’s something all symbiotes can do with human hosts?”

The conversation that followed was awkward, having to wend its way around Mayhem and Venom’s anxiety in the presence of other symbiotes. They both seemed to automatically see one another as threats. Meanwhile, Eddie and Dora seemed to feel equally relieved at knowing that at least one other person had gotten out of this whole debacle alive. 

Dora and Mayhem had apparently faked their own death to escape the Life Foundation. Drake had put Dora into a containment unit with Mayhem, believing it would kill her--and it probably would have, if Mayhem, like Venom, hadn’t already killed several hosts before finally figuring out how to achieve some degree of homeostasis. 

Dora and Mayhem had apparently had their work cut out for them in faking their own deaths, leaving behind bits of Mayhem to be scraped off the floor while Mayhem slowed down Dora’s vitals until she was interpreted as dead. She had still only managed to escape during the ruckus Venom and Riot had created at the rocket launch, when the whole facility was evacuated. 

“Ironic, really, that we both achieved the symbiosis that Drake wanted,” Dora commented, shaking her head. “It's pure chance that we ended up being so compatible. He believed that the symbiotes were learning how not to kill their hosts--which they were, but I don’t think he wanted to understand that there is also a genetic aspect which cannot be learned. I’m still allergic to mine, though thankfully not very much.”

When she left, Eddie promised to contact her again. Being the only two humans in the universe successfully in symbiotic relationships with Klyntar made both of them far more eager to stay connected. 

**

Knowing that Dora allowed her symbiote even around her children, Eddie felt emboldened to take the next step in his relationship with Venom. So, after she left, Eddie decided to do what he’d been avoiding for days: masturbate. 

On a normal day, jerking off wasn’t a big deal. He did it because he was horny, or to calm himself down before sleep, or just because he was bored. But there hadn’t been a single normal day since he’d gone to the Life Foundation for the second time. Hell, there hadn’t been a single normal day since he’d gone the first time. The last normal day had been the one before he’d read Anne’s email. 

Maybe Eddie and Venom would reach a new normal together down the line. But for now, with everything so recent, Eddie couldn’t even jerk off without it being an entirely new act of intimacy for the alien living inside his body. 

Eddie turned the shower on hot and spread himself out in the bottom of Dan’s tub, flattening his hands on his thighs. A human would probably have already understood where he was going with this, but Venom wasn’t a human. Which was the whole point. 

“Hey Venom,” Eddie said softly, and waited for the answering sub-aural hum below his breastbone. “So, orgasms, and your opinion on me having one right now.”

 **Yes yes yes!** Venom responded at once. **I am very curious.**

“Okay, good, consent is good,” Eddie said, himself more nervous now that he had the go-ahead. “It’s just, uh. I assume it’s not gonna...hurt you? This isn’t gonna be like sound at however many gigawatts?”

 **Four to six thousand herz,** Venom corrected. **So long as orgasm does not cause your body to vibrate at those frequencies or catch fire, we should be fine. Do you want help?**

While Eddie couldn’t deny that Venom’s capacity for tentacles did lend themselves to a certain kind of fantasy, Eddie shook his head. The movement of the back of his skull against the hard surface of the tub hurt.

“No, no. Let’s start off with something simple, okay? Just chill out in there, have your first orgasm ever. Let’s keep this uncomplicated. I know what I’m doing.”

And he did, too, though Eddie’s hands were shaking a little as he reached down between his legs. He settled his fingers on either side of the shaft, stroking slowly up and down, until his dick started to firm up. 

**Are you sure you don’t want help?** Venom offered again. A dark pool of his biomass appeared on Eddie’s sternum. 

“Why do you keep asking?” Eddie inquired, swirling his middle finger right over the head and then biting his lip at the little surge of sensation that brought. 

**You’re not playing with your chest! Now that I've fixed the nerve pathways and scar tissue, I can see that the nerves there will get similar responses to the ones in your genitals. I even did research! I used information from what my other hosts’ nipples did in order to regrow the small muscles under your skin.**

Eddie smiled, understanding at once. 

“Right, you want me to see the extra effort you put in, got it. Well fair enough. Nobody likes their gifts to go unappreciated.”

Truthfully, the idea made Eddie feel anxious. Losing nipple sensation had been very upsetting for him. He’d been one of the unlucky (or lucky, depending on how he thought of it) few who started life with a great deal of erotic sensation in his chest. But by the point he’d gotten top surgery he’d already had most of a beard and back pain from binding, so the surgery had been urgent enough that Eddie had just buried the grief under his hope that life would be better in other ways afterward. 

Eddie lifted his left hand up to his pecs and then paused, delaying it just a little longer. What if it wasn’t as good? What if Venom had gotten something wrong and didn’t like hearing that? What if it awoke all the old dysphoria of having people touch his chest like he was a woman? One of the reliefs of getting top surgery had been that other people finally stopped grabbing at his chest. So many people, when confronted with breasts (even hairy ones on a man), just assumed they knew how to touch them, or that they _should_ be touched. It had been a special kind of exhausting getting his partners back then to just leave them alone, to understand that even though Eddie _had_ erotic sensation in them didn't mean he wanted to go there with other people. 

And now here was someone else wanting to play with his chest again. It had been a long time since all the shitty people he’d dated in his early twenties, back in the first years after Y2K. Turned out those memories still sucked, and the sense of loss associated with top surgery was still there. 

**Eddie?** Venom prompted, because Eddie had gone still, his right hand no longer moving on his dick. 

“Yeah, just...” he started, wondering how on earth to explain transness and dysphoria and crappy cis people to an alien with no concept of gender and no solid physical form. “It’s been a long time. I’m kind of scared.”

 **There’s nothing to be scared of,** Venom tried to comfort him. **I made sure I did everything right. I double-checked while I was in Anne.**

Eddie blinked hard at the prickle in his eyes at that. It reminded him so much of dating Anne herself: she saw a problem and she moved immediately to fix it for him. He’d never felt as cared-for as he had with her, even if her interventions had also sometimes pissed him off. 

Then Eddie let himself really look down at his chest for the first time since joining with Venom. He’d been avoiding it for days, too scared of this.

The scars were gone, that much was immediately obvious. Even faded and fully healed as they had been after more than a decade, they had also been such a feature of his chest for so long that the absence was startling. The smooth, uninterrupted skin from collarbones to navel looked somehow more alien right now than when Venom took over. 

And then there were the nipples. Eddie’s nipples had been flat-ish before Venom got to them. They’d gotten a little lumpy from scar tissue, but they’d no longer had the protrusion they featured before surgery. They only showed through his clothes if he wore something skin-tight.

Now, they looked like the nipples of every cis guy Eddie had ever admired. Small, the same size they had been after surgery, but with pebbled edges and a little nub in the middle. 

Eddie finally lowered his left hand to his chest, sweeping the pad of his thumb over the tip--and had to close his eyes against the wash of sensation that followed. 

It was hard to breathe. The thick, damp air of the shower didn’t help.

It wasn’t as if the sensation was overpowering in itself, but it was so _new_ while also being so _old._ He had felt so little in that part of himself for so long that his brain lit up in response to the touch. 

Eddie did it again, and was rewarded with another jolt of feeling. 

It wasn’t as intense as it had used to be. Eddie found himself wondering if this was what Anne’s nipples felt like--she had liked having hers played with, but hadn’t found it as consuming as Eddie remembered his being. Or maybe it was because the neural pathways had been disrupted for so long? Maybe his brain had forgotten how to feel this.

But it felt good nonetheless. When Eddie carefully took his nipple between finger and thumb and gave it a slow squeeze, it was a soft bloom of pleasure spreading over his chest. 

“Thank you,” he croaked out, voice breaking. Of all the things he’d expected when getting infected by an alien life form, this hadn’t been one of them. 

**You are upset!** Venom protested, now sounding unhappy as well. **Did I do it wrong? Tell me what to do and I’ll fix it!**

Biting his lip, Eddie pinched harder at his nipple, and oh, _there_ it was. A bright surge of sensation ran down his spine. 

“There’s--there’s nothing wrong,” Eddie gasped. “It’s just--most men have bodies different from mine. I had to go through major surgeries just to get...here, to a point where I mostly like my body.” It was hard to think. Now that he’d finally jumped the hurdle of acknowledging what Venom had done to his chest, Eddie didn’t want to leave it alone. He pinched it harder, pulling on it and feeling the soft, unscarred tissue yield. His hips rolled. He also felt like maybe he’d cry. “I don’t know how to explain it to someone who’s as unfamiliar with human cultures as you are, but--but a lot of people have been really shitty to me because my body is this way. You, though, you just--you don’t care about any of that, and you just saw somewhere I got hurt and fixed it. And you fixed it just--just right.” 

Eddie sighed as another hot surge went through him. 

**So you’re crying because you’re happy,** Venom said, sounding uncertain now. **That** **_does_ ** **feel good. There were hardly any nerve connections there before.**

“Yeah,” Eddie agreed. He brought his right hand up too, and that felt even better. 

But then he tried to imagine showing this to Anne, or even Dan, and his mind balked. Something in him still flinched away from that, because imagining other people touching his chest, especially cis people, and having his body _respond_ to it--that still felt too much like being seen as a woman. 

Fine, then. This was still just for him. 

And Venom, Eddie realized. This was just for him and _Venom._ Venom, who took what Eddie said about this completely at face value, and didn’t have any gender baggage at all. He’d just as happily taken a curvy shape with breasts when inhabiting Anne, molding himself after whoever he was in. When Eddie had thought about it later, it made sense. Eddie himself had always wanted to be taller, bigger, broader. That idea made him feel powerful, so when Venom took over, that’s how they were. Whereas Anne liked being small and vicious, able to destroy anyone with just her sharpness and clever mind. So Venom had been smaller while in her--and, of course, had a body like the one Anne enjoyed having. 

Eddie smiled. He and Venom _were_ made for each other, weren’t they? Now more than ever he wanted to show Venom how nice a human body could feel. 

This time when Eddie reached down between his legs, his dick was fully hard. So this time he didn’t muck around with it like he did while he was waiting for himself to get turned on. He braced his foot against the wall of the shower and stroked, letting the sensations build just how he liked. 

Eddie remembered some of the best sex he’d had with Anne: the times she’d plugged him up and made him rub off on her foot, the times she’d almost suffocated him sitting on his face, the times she’d put her whole tiny hand in him and rocked her thumb knuckle into his sweet spot till he’d shaken apart. Eddie had spent six months trying and failing to train himself back out of thinking about her whenever he jerked off, and it was a huge relief not to have to drag his thoughts away from her anymore. He could just think it again--because she _wanted_ him again. 

The relief of that was its own kind of release. 

And Eddie wondered what Dan would be like in bed too. Eddie imagined Dan with a cute, small dick, slender and sweet. Eddie imagined rubbing it on his mouth, over his lips, sucking on it till he got bored and then letting Dan put it inside him. 

Eddie felt himself clench down at the thoughts. He imagined Dan’s big hand right where Eddie’s own was now, stroking his dick. He imagined Dan looking overwhelmed and eager to get into him. Eddie imagined himself with a bigger dick, and imagined Dan’s long legs spread out for him, letting Eddie slip inside. Eddie mimicked the feelings with his own fingers, pushing them down along the sides of the shaft, and another surge of response lit up his body. He was getting close. 

He could feel Venom getting agitated. The dark pool on his sternum expanded and contracted, rippling. It made Eddie think of that scene in Jurassic Park where the kids watched the cup of water vibrate with the T-Rex’s footsteps: Venom’s biomass shook with the approach of something big. 

Eddie imagined Venom seeping out from between Eddie’s own legs, tight around his dick and thick and hard inside him. He imagined Venom twisting, fisting up, all the huge push of a human hand with none of the difficulty of getting it in--

Eddie came, long and luxuriant and easy. 

Venom shivered, a low vibration that went through Eddie’s bones. 

**So** **_that’s_ ** **what it feels like,** Venom purred, slow and syrupy. **You’re a _very_ nice species to inhabit.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why yes, this is a highly specific trans power fantasy


	6. Satisfying

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: mentions of past biphobia, brief non-explicit canon-typical violence
> 
> This chapter continues the Explicit rating. If you're not interested in the sexy parts, skip everything after Eddie and Venom get home again.

Dan watched Eddie Brock closely. 

Or, he watched _Eddie._ Just ‘Eddie.’ Dan was having to train himself not to think or say the full name. When Eddie had been just a celebrity, distant and inaccessible, his name had always been the full name: _Eddie Brock._ But people thought it was weird if you used their full first and last name, so there was a sudden retraining happening for Dan.

But the point was, Eddie was four things Dan's brain found fascinating, all at once: the local openly bisexual liberal infotainment figure Dan had enjoyed so much, Dan's girlfriend's ex-fiancé whom she had only had only talked about rarely when she was already tired and upset, a survivor of first contact with a new alien species, and, suddenly, Dan's new boyfriend. Given all those things, Dan's brain homed in on Eddie every time he was in the room.

Eddie was simultaneously everything Dan had imagined his celebrity crush and his girlfriend’s ex to be. And Eddie was also neither of those things. 

Eddie Brock, celebrity, had been easy to crush on. Celebrities were always easier. People Dan actually knew in real life were difficult and scary to develop feelings for. They made him afraid of being too weird, too awkward, too much himself in whatever way. 

Dating had always been a stressful endeavor for Dan. His parents had said he wasn’t allowed to date till he was sixteen. That had been a moot point, because he’d developed a crush on one of his school’s jocks in freshman year, a sweet-faced boy named Juan whom Dan would never in a million years have actually approached. Dan had nursed that crush until they both graduated, and now they were awkwardly FaceBook friends. The fact that Juan had come out as bisexual too at thirty-five had given Dan a feeling of vindication, but it didn’t help his younger self any. 

In undergrad Dan had dated a woman for almost two years, but then she’d dropped out when she suddenly inherited her parents’ substantial fortune and hair product company. With her went most of Dan’s dreams of getting married. 

After that, everything romantic or sexual had been difficult and scattered. People seemed to find endless reasons to reject him, everything from his dick to his sexual orientation. After a while Dan had simply stopped dating straight women after the second one said she hadn’t wanted to date someone she couldn’t satisfy. That hadn’t made any sense to Dan whatsoever. He wasn’t asking them to be men, so why were they worried? He was just asking them to like _him._

Finally he’d applied to and gotten a job at a San Francisco hospital, hoping that dating in one of the biggest clusters of LGBT people in the world would be easier. It wasn’t. The only difference was that West Coast queers simply ghosted him rather than telling him outright what they didn’t like about him. 

Which made celebrity crushes a much-needed relief. Celebrities didn’t disappear on Dan. They didn’t judge him or think he was weird. There was always the worrying question of whether they _would_ if he met them in real life, but if Dan never met them, then he never had that problem. 

The Brock Show had been fun to watch, and the fact that Eddie Brock himself was local had given the crush an extra thrill. What if Eddie Brock and Dan ran into each other in a restaurant while ordering the exact same meal? What if Eddie Brock came to the ER while Dan was on rotation and needed a minor injury stitched and was charmed by Dan’s bedside manner? What if Eddie Brock had his own online dating profile and messaged Dan and they fell in love? None of those things happened, of course, but the thoughts took up some of the emotional energy for which Dan had found no other outlet.

Part of the crush was that Dan had approved of Eddie Brock’s public morals. Eddie Brock tore into corporations and billionaires. He skewered the government for its hypocrisy and neglect. During elections, his run-downs on the candidates were excellent. 

And he talked with his hands, used blunt, unambiguous language, and made big expressions that were easy to read.

Then the network had abruptly cancelled the Brock Show. That had been way more depressing for Dan than he wanted to admit, because he knew people considered it weird to be so attached to a stranger. It was just that there were relatively few openly queer celebrities for him to crush on, and Eddie Brock had been...special.

Shortly afterward, Dan had met Anne. And then he hadn’t needed celebrities as much anymore.

The day he had realized her ex-fiancé Eddie was _Eddie Brock,_ however, Dan had a meltdown. He had been forced to remove himself immediately from a date with her, lying and saying he had food poisoning. Dan hadn’t known what to do. It had taken him several hours of sitting paralyzed, actively stopping himself from stimming in ways that would hurt him, to calm down enough to realize that maybe it wasn’t a problem. Hearing that the object of his cherished sweet fantasies was also the man who'd so deeply hurt Dan's new girlfriend was a lot to deal with, but maybe it wasn't relationship problem. Dan could date Anne and still have his celebrity crush because she wasn’t _with_ Eddie Brock anymore, and it wasn't like the crush would result in anything. 

Now that Dan had met Eddie Brock in real life, the mystique had finally worn off. Eddie having poor boundaries and showing up at Anne’s house for no reason wasn’t great. Rescuing Eddie Brock from a public meltdown due to alien-related psychosis had been very, very bad. As was the current corporate-hit-squad-related homelessness. But that was the thing: the mystique wore off Eddie Brock and left a human being Dan liked and found attractive, who was at least temporarily living in Dan’s house and apparently now dating both Anne and Dan himself. 

The physicality of Eddie Brock kept surprising Dan. Eddie was shorter than Dan had anticipated. True, Eddie was five foot eight inches, which was around average height for American men, but Dan himself was six foot three. The fact that Eddie didn’t come past Dan’s nose was...unexpectedly charming. Dan’s fantasies about Eddie had never before included the fact that Dan could tuck the top of Eddie’s head under his chin if he wanted to, but they did now. 

Then there was the fact that Eddie wasn’t _just_ Eddie, now. Venom was in there too.

And Venom was...strange. Charming in his own way. He liked Dan’s house, he said, because it was _quiet_ except for sounds which they chose. Dan had been hard-put to find electronics that didn’t hum or buzz or make high-pitched sounds, but it had been the effort of years to collect a household of belongings that didn’t set off Dan’s misophonia, and now he had a space that was the best he could accomplish. That Venom liked it too felt flattering, a recognition of all that hard work. 

If Dan had thought he himself was sensitive to noise, it was nothing compared to Venom. Venom didn't seem to be upset by his sensitivity like Dan was, but it was still incredible what Venom could hear. Dan had bought his own free-standing house as soon as he could afford it precisely because he couldn’t handle listening to all the sounds that came with sharing walls, floors, or a ceiling with neighbors. But Venom could tell when Anne was coming up the walkway by the sound of her stride even when Eddie and Dan were in the kitchen, far away from the front door. He could tell which of the neighbors had a cold by their breathing. And he could, apparently, hear when Dan’s heartbeat sped up while looking at him. Or Eddie. 

It was a relief to be around someone who didn’t think Dan was ‘too sensitive.’ To Venom, even Dan seemed unperceptive. 

For the first two days, the idea of having a real alien living in Dan’s house was very stressful. It was hard enough figuring out the endless unspoken rules of allistic _human_ socializing, and now Dan was supposed to figure out how not to upset an entirely new species? But Dan’s anxieties on that subject were short-lived when it became obvious that Venom was every bit as confused and wanted just as badly to make a good impression. 

But the truly stunning, unthinkable thing, somehow even stranger than the presence of an actual alien in the house, was this: _Eddie Brock seemed to like Dan._ It wasn’t just that unexpected kiss from Venom (because of course it had been Venom, Eddie Brock was desperate not to fuck things up with Anne again, and if there was any act guaranteed to piss off most women, it was making out with their boyfriends uninvited). It was the way Eddie talked to and interacted with Dan.

Eddie talked a lot. He could chatter on about a seemingly endless array of subjects. But also, within the first two days of Eddie moving into the house, he had asked Dan about his job at the hospital, his exes, his favorite movies, where he’d grown up, his relationship with his family, _everything._ With Eddie, Dan didn’t have to figure out how or when or if to volunteer information, because Eddie just _asked._ Being the object of that much interest made Dan himself feel like he was a celebrity. 

Finally Eddie asked Dan about the calligraphy on the walls. Dan had frozen up at that, worried about info-dumping with someone he wanted this badly to impress. But Eddie had smiled and leaned close enough that his shoulder pressed into Dan’s side and Dan could feel Eddie’s body heat on his ribcage and hip and thigh. Then Eddie had just said, “Please?”

Dan had ended up not only telling Eddie about the processes of creating each of the types of calligraphy he had in the house, Dan had brought up his favorite sites online to show Eddie videos of calligraphy being made. 

“It’s soothing,” Dan admitted. “There’s something about the movement of the artist’s hand with the pen or the brush, the flow of the lines from one to the next, and the way the artists just know where to go. The expertise of it, the amount of skill it takes, and the way that skill produces such beautiful things just seems like magic to me.”

It was the calmest Dan had ever seen Eddie while he wasn’t being filmed. Dan watched the screen and listened to Eddie’s breathing slow as he leaned into Dan. 

Venom liked it too, judging by the low, gravelly hum that emanated from somewhere around Eddie’s navel.

By the time Anne arrived later that evening, Dan already felt so full of love he thought he’d burst.

**

The third time Anne saw Eddie again after the events at the Life Foundation, she realized she needed to take control of things again, as had once been normal between her and Eddie. The relief was overwhelming. 

Dan reported that Eddie was lovely to be around. ‘Easy company’ was the phrase Dan used, to Anne’s shock. But when Eddie was around Anne, he fell apart. 

Eddie had always been scattered. He’d leave tasks half-finished, change topics in the middle of a sentence, and forget to do things like eat or shave. 

But it was even worse than usual now. Anne knew what Eddie was like when he was calm and this wasn’t it. He fidgeted so badly that he couldn’t stay in his seat through a meal, getting up to check his new phone or go to the bathroom multiple times--but when he went to the bathroom, she never heard the toilet flush, so she assumed the bathroom was just an excuse to leave his seat. Hell, once she watched Eddie forget the meal right in front of him in the middle of eating it, letting the food go cold as he looked at her and asked her about her day at work. His cuticles were bloody where he picked at them, and any piece of paper left within his orbit would wind up torn into small fragments that he then rolled into tight balls, which then wound up everywhere. 

Some of that could be dismissed as the effects of a recent trauma plus adapting to having his body inhabited by an alien species. That was enough to leave anyone unsettled. So it took Anne several days to figure out what it really was: Eddie was so overwhelmed just by being around her that he was coming apart at the seams. 

On day three of her new polyamorous lifestyle, Anne pulled Dan aside. 

“Is he like this all the time?” she asked, voice low so Eddie wouldn’t overhear. He was in the kitchen doing the dishes at her request, and he’d already gotten side-tracked no less than four separate times that she’d seen: checking his phone, moving the mail around on the counter, cleaning the sink before he’d gotten all the dishes out of it, and picking at his fingers. 

“Like what?”

“This scattered,” Anne clarified. “And visibly anxious.”

Dan sighed, looking at the floor. “No. I didn’t want to say, but he’s been a lot worse since you arrived. Every time you’ve come over, in fact.”

Several seconds passed before Anne realized she had one hand up under her wig, a hair selected, and she was pulling. The hair came free between her nails with a blissful sharp pop, and _fuck_ Dan was _right there watching._ She quickly dragged her hand down, forcing herself to drop the hair so it wouldn’t wind up in her mouth. But she wanted that so badly--the satisfying way it felt to twine a single long strand around the tip of her tongue, the familiar swirl around and around to curl it into a little ball, and the exact resistance of it between her front incisors when she bit down on it. 

_Disgusting,_ her family had always said, a vile habit. Not to mention that it _hurt._ Her scalp was already so sore.

“If I had to guess, I think he’s scared of letting you down again,” Dan murmured, his voice and eyes gentle and nonjudgmental, both of what he’d just seen her do and of Eddie as well. “It’s probably a lot of pressure, getting your fiancée back after six months apart and several near-death experiences.”

Anne took Dan’s hand, lacing their fingers together. This way she couldn’t pluck. And Dan’s hands were always warm, a wonderful trait in a doctor.

 _You’re scared too,_ she admitted to herself. _You look at Eddie and you’re ready to_ be _let down again. No wonder he’s coming apart._

She sighed. 

_Structure,_ she thought. _You both need structure. So how do we do this?_

She didn’t have any of her rope with her, that was all at her apartment. She could ask Venom to help her, but that wasn’t what she wanted either. It left too much out of her hands. So she glanced around the kitchen till her eye settled on a fresh, unopened box of cling wrap. 

A little wasteful, perhaps, but it would do. 

Once Eddie finally finished the dishes, Anne called him into the living room. She had already picked out a movie she wished to watch, one she knew Dan had been meaning to get around to. Anne gestured at the floor between her feet. 

With a quick glance at her face, as though checking to be sure she meant it, Eddie settled onto the carpet in front of the couch. He took a deep breath and let it out in a shaky sigh. It only took another moment for her to open up the box, find the end of the cling film, and press it to Eddie’s chest. 

“Hold this here. I’m going to tie your arms with it, all right?”

The beautiful thing was that Eddie didn’t question her and seemed to understand immediately what she meant. He positioned the end of the plastic at the crook of his elbow, holding its width flat against his bicep. Anne looped the roller around him several times, tight enough to bind his arms to his sides, before tearing the plastic with a fingernail and sticking it to itself. 

“Hands, palms flat together,” she demanded, and he lifted his forearms as much as he could to make them available to her. She quickly wrapped his hands as well, tucking the end in around his wrist. 

“Now up on the couch.”

Carefully, since he now lacked his upper limbs to balance himself, Eddie got to his feet. For several seconds he shuffled around on the cushions, figuring out what position would be best, before he settled enough for her to sink to one knee and bind his ankles as well. 

After that it was the work of a few moments to twist a final length of plastic, wait a moment for him to understand and open his mouth for it, and then tie the ends together at the back of his neck. 

“Don’t drool,” she instructed Eddie. “If you drool on yourself, I will not clean it up, and I will make you sit in it. Tilt your head back and swallow if you need to.”

Eddie nodded, then tipped his chin up exactly as instructed. His Adam’s apple bobbed. A muscle at the corner of his jaw jumped as he bit down on the plastic trapped between his molars. She hoped it had a satisfying texture.

Anne slid her fingers under the edges of the plastic, checking that it wasn’t digging into him anywhere, or that if it was, it was cushioned by his clothes. Then she finally turned her gaze to Dan, who watched them with interest. 

“Put in the movie for me?” she asked with a smile, and he did. 

Anne tucked her right hand between Eddie’s thighs while Dan held her left one. It had never occurred to her before how much she would like having a partner to occupy each hand. Now, it seemed like a luxury she had always been waiting to have. A pain in her belly that she’d barely noticed eased into nothingness.

Twice she paused the film, pulling Eddie’s chin around to look into his eyes and check that he was okay. He just looked back at her, blinking slowly, the lines between his eyebrows smoothed out for the first time since he’d come back into her life. Eddie shifted around a few times but that was all. Otherwise he stayed right where she put him.

**

By the time the movie ended, Eddie had sunk into subspace. Venom slid tendrils along the outside of Eddie’s ribcage, forcing his breathing to slow still further. 

**This is fascinating,** Venom said as Anne and Dan discussed the movie at Eddie’s side. **She just used** **_plastic_ ** **to get you to do what I have to directly stimulate your glands to accomplish.**

Eddie didn’t want to talk, and anyway Anne had removed that possibility. So he just nodded his head a little. The corners of his mouth hurt and his jaw ached, but he liked that. Besides, Venom would heal any lingering problems. 

Eddie wasn’t really tracking the conversation between Anne and Dan. Dan was mentioning his appreciation for a scene he’d liked when Anne checked Dan’s watch and then stood up from the couch. 

With interest Eddie watched her go, the fresh shave of her legs glossy and alluring in the heavily-shaded low light of Dan’s lamps. Dan liked natural light where possible, he’d said, which meant that in the evening, his house was dim and comfortable. 

Anne returned with her pocket knife. She moved to stand right in front of Eddie, slipping the blade between his cheek and the plastic, sharp edge tilted away from his face as she sawed at the saran wrap. Her left hand cradled the back of Eddie’s head, cushioning it as the plastic released with a jerk. 

“Hnnn,” Eddie moaned as she lifted the makeshift gag off his tongue. Pain bloomed behind it, bloodflow returning to his cheeks. 

Snapping the knife closed, Anne tossed it onto the couch and dug the tip of her thumbs into the hinges of his jaw. Eddie couldn’t tell if it was meant to be a massage of the sore muscle or her just wanting it to hurt worse, but he didn’t really care. Either way was fine with him. 

“Venom, baby, come out where I can see you,” Anne smiled, tracing a fingernail over the marks around Eddie’s mouth. 

The colors of the room shifted as Venom took over Eddie’s face. The pain also vanished immediately, and all at once Eddie could smell how aroused Anne was. The stress-sweat of her work day almost masked it, along with her deodorant and fabric detergent. But just detectable beneath that was a thin thread of the lush, wet smell of her sex. 

Venom dropped their jaw, tongue curling out to further taste her in the air. She had just finished menstruating, Eddie realized, judging by the faint traces of blood-smell coming from between her thighs. 

“Eddie, you were lovely and quiet throughout the movie and I appreciate that. Now I’m gonna go be with just Dan for a while before I go home for the night. Venom, you take care of him for me for the rest of the evening, okay? That means you get him out of the rest of this,” she gestured at the remaining saran wrap, “and get him to bed at a reasonable hour. Which for him means midnight.”

 **“Yes ma’am,”** Venom agreed. 

It took another second for Eddie to realize what was happening. Anne let go of his face, holding her hand out to Dan instead, who rose and followed her down the hall. If Anne smelled like that, and she was going to go spend time with just Dan--

 **I wonder if she knows I’m going to listen to them fucking,** Venom said right as the realization struck Eddie himself. 

The suite of feelings that followed was complicated. 

First came a hot tide of anger. Anne had tied him up, gotten him into subspace, and now she was just gonna _leave to be with someone else?_ Just like that? How dare she!

Then the anger extinguished under a wash of bitter shame. Eddie had been a barely-controlled wreck every time he’d seen her this whole week, and even now that his body wasn’t falling apart he couldn’t seem to get himself together. He knew his constant jittering was hard for her to handle, and Eddie had been going nonstop for the last three nights running. So she’d been _forced_ to intervene to stop him, and now she was tired and wanted to be away from him again. Managing his bullshit was all this had been.

Then came jealousy. She wanted _Dan_ tonight, not him. Dan, with his cis dick and his soft mouth and his warm hands and his earnest smile and his beautiful house. And Dan wanted her back--he wanted _Anne,_ not Eddie. 

**You’re ruining what she did,** Venom grumbled, and cut through the plastic with a quick surge. **I want to listen to them fuck, but if you’re going to freak out, I’m taking us for a walk instead.**

Venom grabbed the spare keys and new phone Dan had given them and locked the door behind them. 

The sharp chill of the outdoors caught Eddie off guard, tightening his nipples to stiff peaks and raising gooseflesh everywhere else. He was just about to complain when Venom flowed over Eddie’s skin under his clothes, a thin, tingling layer between Eddie and the night. Eddie tried not to react, tried to stay upset, but it just felt so good to be wrapped up in Venom again, even partially, that he grimaced as a thrill of pleasure settled between his legs. 

Venom got them to the local park. He stood at the corner of one of the paths, hungrily watching the dogs in their fenced off area. At just past nine in the evening there weren’t many, but at least three were still running and barking nearby.

 **Why are you being like this,** Venom asked at last. **You know they’re together. This is not a surprise. And we are dating both of them now. Are humans not supposed to fuck by themselves if they’re dating more than one person?**

“Well no, that’s not a rule we’ve set, but--” Eddie started to say, and then realized he didn’t have any argument to follow it with. “But I don’t like it,” he finished unhappily. “I thought--I dunno. I was feeling special to both of them today, and then...this.”

 **Do you even listen to yourself?** Venom grumbled. **You had a good time with both of them! You’re dating both of them. If you want to fuck them yourself already, you should have just said! You know I’m every bit as eager.**

Eddie was very aware, yes. He’d jerked off no less than three separate times today, twice because Venom had asked for it, excited by the simple smell of Dan in the house on his day off. Eddie had kept finding his mouth watering just looking at him. 

“Yeah, I guess but--but--” Eddie waved his hands at nothing, trying to figure out how to explain why he was upset. The feelings were so wordless, though, just big and hot and miserable.

 **All the things we read about polyamory said if you get your feelings hurt then you should just talk about it. I don’t understand why you’re mad when everything is going well, but if you don’t like this, just tell them! Or** **_I’ll_ ** **do it if you won’t.**

For several more seconds, Eddie gritted his teeth, remembering the wet crinkle of the plastic in his mouth, the reassuring pressure on his hands so he couldn’t pick at himself or do anything but just watch the movie, and feel Anne's hand on his inner thigh, just at the hem of his boxers. 

“Fine,” he agreed at last, with what he knew was bad grace.

**Tell her next time you need her to fuck you after she ties you up. Or Dan.**

“No, that’s not--” Eddie started to disagree, but then Venom literally sealed his mouth shut. Eddie’s hand flew up to his face, outraged, before Venom pulled them into the shadow of a small tree by the gate of the dog park.

 **There are sixteen men coming toward us and they’re talking about me,** Venom said. **They are all armed. The weapons are concealed, and they’re wearing clothes of a fiber I’ve never encountered before.**

Venom unsealed his mouth and Eddie dragged in a deep breath, trying to suppress the automatic panic--and ignore the curl of anticipatory pleasure that went through him, too. 

“So what do we do? What’s the plan?”

Half a minute later they were on the roof of a nearby house, watching as the group passed by below. If Venom hadn’t told him they were all armed, Eddie wouldn’t have known; they wore hoodies and sweats and were jogging together, looking like nothing more than a sports team training together before bed. 

“Where’s the target?” one of the men asked in an undertone Eddie could only hear because of Venom. 

“Split up into four groups to cover the park, signal if you find it,” one near the head of the team said. Without any further instruction the men did so, fanning out over the pathways, heads swiveling to scan the bushes. 

Venom’s tongue curled downward, saliva dripping into the flowerbed below. 

_Wait,_ Eddie pleaded. _Don’t just eat these guys, we don’t know who they are!_

 **“They came into a suburb armed with guns and they want to capture me,”** Venom purred, readying them to spring. **“Who they are does not matter.”**

When it was put like that, Eddie had to admit that he agreed. 

Five minutes later, the first group of four were dead, heads neatly bitten off and bodies discarded in a rosebush. They not only had guns, but _silenced_ ones. The small-caliber bullets almost tickled, with nothing like the blast force of the shotguns and assault rifles used by the SWAT team or Life Foundation’s hit squad. 

Ten minutes later, eight more were dead, and Venom had enough biomass to not only cover Eddie’s entire body but increase their height by an extra foot. One of the team had used some sort of tranq weapon that fired a series of darts at Eddie, but Venom jumped out of the way and then ripped off the man’s right arm. It was as delicious as the rest of him. 

The final four realized the rest of their team were gone and fled the scene. As they left, Venom and Eddie overheard them radio in to base, confirming that they were, in fact, Hydra. 

Eddie felt extra satisfied that they’d gotten to eat Nazis. 

But that still meant that they had ten remaining partial bodies to dispose of. Venom listened carefully to the surrounding neighborhood, picked out an empty house, broke into the garage, and stacked the corpses next to the owner’s kayak and fishing gear. 

Then Eddie called Dora Skirth with the encrypted call application they’d downloaded. She picked up quickly, already sounding concerned. 

“Hey, so, a Hydra team just came after us in public,” Eddie murmured as he walked slowly back to Dan’s house, trying to look casual. “Four of them got away. If they know where I am, chances are they could know where you and your kids are. Be on guard.”

 **“Thank you,”** Mayhem growled, voice sounding even worse over a phone than it did in person. **“I was starting to get really hungry anyway.”**

“Tomorrow I’ll take the kids to stay with a friend across the country,” Dora sighed. “They’re still too young for school, and it’s not like I have a job anymore anyway.”

“Also, if you have a burner phone, can you use it to call the cops for me? Otherwise some poor homeowner is gonna get a nasty surprise when they get back.”

Dora did have a burner phone, it turned out, so Eddie gave her the address where they’d stashed the corpses so she could call in an anonymous tip.

They ended the call. 

Probably, Eddie thought as he unlocked the front door and let himself into the house, he should feel worried that one of the largest and best-funded Nazi organizations of all time had just tried to capture him. If nothing else, he thought he should still feel stressed by the idea that Dan and Anne might still be fucking in Dan’s room. 

But he didn’t. All he could feel was the lingering pleasure of being Venom at full power again, massive and strong and _sensitive_ all at once. Venom could feel the movement of water through the neighborhood’s pipes and the rumble of distant cars across the asphalt, and he could taste the presence of every nearby living creature. 

They retreated to the bathroom right away, shucking off their clothes (only a little bloodstained, Eddie noted with relief) and Eddie only just had time to lean over to start the shower before Venom had a hand between their legs, two fingertips already pressing at the side of Eddie’s dick. 

“Goddamn, I want to fuck something,” Eddie whispered. “What I wouldn’t give for my double-ended dildo right about now.”

 **What is a--oh!** Venom started to ask and then stopped. Eddie still wasn’t clear on how much of Eddie’s thoughts and memories Venom could interpret. Sometimes he seemed to rely on physical cues from Eddie, like his heart rate. But he’d learned English just by being inside Eddie, and now their shared body seemed to be enough for Venom to understand what a dildo was. 

**You don’t need one of those when you have me,** Venom rumbled, sounding even more pleased with himself now. **If you wanted a dick like that, you should have just said.**

Before Eddie could even reply, a hot rush of sensation had him staring down at his thighs, agog as fluid black flesh covered his pubic mound and spiraled upward before coalescing into the shape of a human penis. 

Eddie stared at it. He’d wanted something like this for so many years that the reality of it left him stunned and so weak-kneed with arousal that he sat down on the toilet before he could collapse. His cock slapped against his thigh as he did so. 

It was--big. Well, _massive_ might be a better word, really. It was a size more in keeping with Venom’s body rather than Eddie’s.

“I don’t suppose you could manage some balls as well,” Eddie choked out, watching the flared corona bob as the flex of his internal muscles made the whole shaft jump. The veins along the side of it were pearlescent white. 

**Of course. Spread your legs to make room.**

Eddie shuffled his knees apart. Another ripple of sensation was all the warning he got before two equally oversized balls plumped down between his thighs. He could _feel_ how hard he was, which was almost breaking his brain, along with the cool press of the toilet’s lid against the bottom of his balls. 

Grinning helplessly, Eddie shook his head. “I like your style, but this is a little ridiculous. It’s just us, y’know? We’re not trying to impress anyone. We can go for something smaller for our first time.”

 **Fine,** Venom grumbled without any real rancor, and the whole package shrank to something more within human limits. Still large, but at least not monstrously so. **I’ve just got so much biomass now. It seems a shame to waste it.**

“Yeah yeah, brag about it all day,” Eddie laughed, still staring between his own thighs in astonished delight. 

He took several breaths to steady himself before he did anything else, feeling Venom’s own anticipatory trembling along his breastbone. Eddie’s hand shook and he flexed it a few times before he at last reached to grasp his new body part. 

It was warm to the touch and Eddie could _feel every inch._ His eyes fluttered shut and he bit his lip to keep from moaning. Sweat broke out all over his body. He could feel his pulse under his palm. The simultaneous weirdness and joy of the experience twined together so closely that Eddie couldn’t tell them apart. 

“You must have been in a cis guy before Maria, huh,” he gasped, because the realism of it was--incredible. He firmed up his grip, twisting a little, and felt the skin move smoothly over the hard shaft underneath it, bunching up around the sensitive head. 

Venom didn’t even have time to answer. It took barely six strokes before Eddie came, hunched over his knees, keening through his nose. He dug his left hand into his hair, pulling on it, trying not to pass out. For a moment his dick writhed, collapsing into a twisting limb that grabbed at Eddie’s hand. Then Venom seemed to remember himself, and Eddie’s handful reformed into a dick again. 

Afterward it took them a long time to get up and move into the shower. When they finally managed it, Eddie couldn’t think of anything but the soft pressure of his balls on his thighs, the shrinking weight of his dick above that. Even the movement of the hot water over it was almost enough to have him sinking to his knees on the bottom of the tub. 

“Could you,” Eddie began, and then swallowed hard, staring at himself. “Could you make it look more like the rest of me? Like, my skin color?”

 **Yes,** Venom replied, and it was barely said before Eddie's brand new genitals paled from midnight-black to a more human pinkish-brown. **I could also grow you your own from what you already have. But that would take me some more serious work. And time. Do you want that?**

Eddie didn’t know how to answer that. 

He had acquaintances who’d gotten phalloplasties. Their results had been beautiful and his friends had been happy, but Eddie had known it wasn’t for him. The intensity of the recovery process scared him, and he feared that having a large, lifelong scar on his forearm might harm his ability to go stealth. And, well...while Eddie didn’t like having genitals that some people viewed as female, in private he enjoyed his parts well enough not to want to want them removed to make something else. 

“Maybe,” he admitted after a pause. 

**We can always just do this,** Venom said, and didn’t even have to manifest a face for Eddie to _hear_ the grin in his voice. He had Eddie hard again within seconds. 

By the time Eddie finally got out of the shower, he’d forgotten about anyone else but Venom.


	7. Cleaning Up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I am an occasional MCU fan, and because Venom from the comics canonically takes place within the larger Marvel universe, I'm including some MCU-related stuff as a deus-ex-machina to help me avoid things I don't wanna write. Also since the larger canon of the MCU has gone in a variety of directions I think are terrible, this takes place in an MCU AU starting after the events of Winter Soldier. 
> 
> Here's a shorter chapter after the longer previous one!

The next morning, Eddie woke up and realized several things in sequence. 

One, that he’d been attacked by Hydra operatives last night, which meant that Dan and Anne were at risk as long as he was close to them and he should tell them about that. Because Venom could handle most attacks aimed directly at Eddie, but neither of them could handle it if someone got ahold of Anne or Dan to use them as leverage. 

Two, that he was still unhappy about how things had gone down with Anne and Dan, which meant he needed to man up and talk to them about it before Venom did it for him, because letting an alien have his relationship conversations for him was just embarrassing. 

Three, he hadn’t injected himself with testosterone for a while now. He wasn’t actually sure when his last shot had been--he thought he remembered doing it the same day he’d escaped from the Life Foundation’s security team, while he was feverish and unaware of Venom as anything but a hallucination, but everything from that period was so foggy that it might not have happened at all. And even if he had done it then, that was over a week ago now, which meant that at a minimum Eddie was a few days overdue for his shot. 

Four, his injection supplies were still at his apartment. Which the cops had maybe finished processing by now, but since his lawyer hadn’t notified him one way or the other, maybe they hadn’t. 

Five, now that Venom was at full strength again, they could sneak in at night without too much bother. So that needed to be his plan for the evening. 

After turning these thoughts over and over in his mind for a while, Eddie finally got himself out of bed, got dressed, and set out to make himself some breakfast. A brief check down the hall showed Dan’s bedroom door open with nobody inside it, which meant that he and Anne had left for work already. So Eddie set out to make scrambled eggs and pancakes for himself, putting the news on for something to listen to. 

Which was how he found out that the Avengers quinjet had landed in the Bay Area during the night, blown up a massive Hydra base in Sonoma county, mopped up the troops stationed there, and were now conducting interviews about it. They even had the new guy in the background, the one nobody knew the identity of who just went by Soldier. 

Well, that hopefully crossed a few concerns off the worry list. Hydra’s whole schtick was about cutting off one head and growing two back, so probably Eddie shouldn’t assume everything was hunky-dory just because the superteam had showed up. But the Avengers had been infamously gung-ho about hunting Hydra down ever since the massive SHIELD data dump two years ago. And the Avengers seemed to be having dramatic international success. So maybe Eddie didn’t have to work himself up into a panic attack about it just yet. 

After the big Avengers news came more updates on the “Life Foundation scandal.” Various channels had already aired the photos Eddie had taken of the symbiote experimentation chambers. Eddie’s old boss had sent him a slough of emails offering him a new position with the channel, but Eddie had said he’d think it over. He wasn’t so sure putting Venom in front of cameras was a good idea. What if some noise in the wrong frequency happened while he was on film? What if some of the wiring sparked and the building caught fire? It was nothing short of miraculous that, given how often Venom and Eddie had been on the run through the city, no one had managed to get film of him transforming back into Eddie himself, or recognized Eddie enough to make it publicly known that Eddie and the "alien" were one and the same.

Eddie wanted to keep it that way. If he could negotiate for some other type of reporting job, however, that would be a different story. 

After breakfast, just when Eddie was wondering what to do with himself for another day, his lawyer called, giving him the go-ahead to return to his apartment. 

That removed another few things from the worry list as well. Eddie took the two buses back to his place, dug out the spare key he kept hidden in a corner of the laundry room, and let himself in. 

The cops hadn’t done much other than cleaning up the blood splatter. The place was still a wreck. And it smelled weird. 

Cleaning was, Eddie could admit, not his forte. It was boring, and he tended to get distracted doing it. But as much as he liked Dan, he didn’t want to stay in the guy’s spare bedroom forever. Firstly because it was embarrassing to be dependent like that, and secondly because it muddied whatever three-way dating process they had going on now. Eddie wasn’t normally a U-haul queer and had no desire to become one now by moving in permanently when they'd barely started dating. Plus, maybe if Eddie didn’t have to be in the same house where Anne and Dan were fucking without him, it wouldn’t upset him so much. 

Standing among the scattered garbage from the tossed can, the splintered coffee table, the scattered cookware and whatever else all this mess was, Eddie decided to start with the one thing he knew he could finish: getting his damn T shot done. So he went to the bathroom, found his needles and alcohol wipes and the little vial of pale golden oil, and sat down on the floor to do what he needed. Choosing such an unsanitary location in which to inject would probably make Annie blow a gasket if she knew, but it had never bothered Eddie. He had a strong immune system, especially now Venom was in there. 

**What are you doing that for?** Venom interrupted while Eddie was in the middle of the slow process of drawing up his dosage. **You don’t need that.**

“Yes I fuckin’ do,” Eddie disagreed, continuing the pull on the plunger. Even using a 22g needle, which was the largest gauge Eddie could bear to stick into his muscle once a week, the oil took forever to move. “I don’t have the glands anymore to produce all the hormones I need, so I have to use this stuff to make up for it.”

 **I’m tired of needles. The Life Foundation took so much blood from my first human hosts. And marrow samples. And other samples which hurt.** **I don’t want more needles.**

Snorting, Eddie shook his head. 

“Well me neither, bub, but until they develop a way to just teleport the stuff into me, this is what we’ve got.”

 **Eddie. You’ve got** **_me._ ** **You don’t require needles anymore.**

At this Eddie froze, still staring at the bubble of vacuum above the oil in the chamber of the syringe. 

“What?”

**I can eat an entire person whole, clothes and all. There’s nothing stopping me from just consuming that bottle and releasing its contents into your bloodstream on whatever timeline you like.**

Lowering his arms, Eddie tried to process this information. 

“What _does_ happen to the clothes of the guys you eat? And shit like piercings and gold teeth and IUDs and stuff?”

**The chemical makeup of a Klyntar is much more complex than that of your simple carbon-based life forms. We can make use of almost anything as biomass. And the few compounds I can’t use, I have so far excreted into your waste.**

With an incredulous shake of his head, Eddie laughed. “So you’ve had me pooping people’s shoes and whatnot.”

 **Shoes are digestible. But that’s otherwise close enough to the truth.**

Eddie looked at the needle again, thinking about the inch-and-a-half length of it and how much he disliked shoving it into his thigh muscle every week. Having been on T for more than a decade meant that he had experienced a grand total of way too many goddamn shots. He knew people could inject into less-painful fatty tissue like the belly and hips now, using smaller needles, but his MediCal plan only covered the bigger needles. 

“I really don’t like the idea of having my bottle of testosterone floating around in my torso somewhere,” Eddie said, still resisting even though the idea of not having to inject anymore sounded great. Because if he had to choose between needles and having a small glass bottle drifting around near his liver, he’d choose the needles. 

**That is not how it works.** Venom sounded put-upon. **I am capable of forming a small gland to store the oil in and then digesting the glass and rubber and metal. Do you honestly think I just store whole objects inside you? What do you think I do, tuck them alongside your intestines?**

For another few seconds Eddie stared at the wall, realizing now how ridiculous that idea was. Then he started pushing the oil back into the little glass bottle. Once it was all back in, he held up the vial. 

“Okay then, I believe you. Do your thing.”

Venom swelled upward from Eddie’s palm, enveloped the bottle, and then it was gone. Afterward Eddie didn’t feel any different. 

**I could grow you new glands, too,** Venom added after a moment. **I repaired the scar tissue where the old ones were, and I know from Anne and Maria what they were like.**

Snorting at this, Eddie shook his head. “Absolutely _not._ I had those removed for a reason. They produce a completely different hormone from what I need.”

 **No, I mean I could grow glands in here that would produce** **_that_ ** **hormone. I could make real versions of the glands you had me imitate last night and just store them in here where your old glands used to be.**

“You could--” Eddie started to say, and then buried his face in his hands, rubbing at his brow. “You’re not just shitting me. That’s really a thing you could do, is grow me a pair of internal testicles.”

 **Of course! Regrowing organs for hosts is a fairly common need for Klyntar. We’re so widely hated in the universe that our hosts get attacked a lot.**

“Yeah, but--but you wouldn't just be regrowing what I used to have,” Eddie insisted, unable to make himself believe this. It sounded too good. “You’d be growing _new_ glands inside me, based on my DNA, that _don’t_ produce eggs and _do_ produce testosterone.”

 **Stop doubting me,** Venom said, sounding offended. **It’s not like it’s difficult.**

“I’m not--” Swallowing, Eddie shook his head. His chest hurt, a tense ache along his sternum, and his fingers stuck to each other with sweat. Wiping them on his pants gave Eddie no relief.

“You don’t understand. My whole life I’ve been told I cannot have the things you think are so easy. I’ve had to accept all the ways my body is not and would never be what I wanted or needed. And then you just waltz in here like _ohh, Eddie, I can grow you some balls if you want, why are you so surprised.”_ The breath Eddie drew in then was ragged and wet and he blinked hard, trying to stave off the prickling at the corners of his eyes. 

**So this is another situation of crying because you are happy?** Venom asked, confused now. **But you don’t seem happy.**

The weight of the last two decades of life pressed down on Eddie. It was all so much, and while he wanted to explain himself to Venom, he found he didn’t _want_ Venom to understand this. He didn’t want Venom to develop anything like a ‘normal’ perspective on gender or bodies or anything else. 

Eddie wanted Venom to understand his gratitude. But Eddie didn’t know how to express it without talking about the constant intrusive fear of being discovered after becoming a public figure, the exhaustion of anticipating people’s incredulity and hatred if they did find out, the rage at having to be patient at the endless small-mindedness of cis people, the disgust at the way other men behaved among themselves, the loss of his family and the constant temptation to contact them again, and the embarrassed self-consciousness at how much _better_ he still had it than most of the other trans people he knew. Venom could maybe understand the painful physical realities of surgeries and sensation loss and injections, because he lived in human bodies and felt what they felt. But because of who and what Venom was, he couldn’t comprehend having to just _live_ with those problems day after day after day. 

Eddie had accepted the physical and emotional realities of his life because he had to, because there were no other choices available to him. But the euphoric relief of having even one part of the burden removed just highlighted the grief of all the rest of it. 

Later this year Eddie would turn forty. Looking around his dirty, miserable little apartment, he thought about how _this_ wasn’t what he’d ever wanted or imagined having at this age. 

But then, he also hadn’t pictured being possessed by an alien who was eager to grow him a pair of balls, either, or getting to date a gorgeous couple who had already seen him at his abject worst and still wanted him. So. Win some and lose some. 

“I’m not unhappy,” he said at last. “And yeah. I’d like it if you did that.”

**

Cleaning the apartment would take a lot of work. For a while Eddie just stared at the mess, feeling like a bad soothsayer trying to read the future from apartment entrails. Where was he supposed to start? So many things needed to happen and some things couldn't be done without other things being done first. But it was just too many options, and the idea of picking wrong and making it worse overwhelmed Eddie. 

Venom was no help; his suggestion was just that he fill the whole apartment with his biomass and digest everything in it. Which admittedly had the benefit of being very straightforward and simple, but there were a lot of possessions Eddie didn’t want to either lose or partially poop out later. 

Finally Eddie started with one thing: his laptop. He was especially tired of borrowing Dan’s. Dan’s wasn’t the same brand as his, with different buttons and trackpad settings, and the impatience of using it had been driving Eddie mad. Plugging in his laptop and opening it up revealed the small miracle that it hadn’t been damaged in all the fighting. 

With the laptop open, Eddie righted his desk chair, dusted off the seat, and set it down in front of the desk. Then it seemed natural to answer some emails from his old boss. The man had connections, and said he could get Eddie a job as an investigative reporter for a major print publication. That sounded pretty ideal to Eddie, so he shot off a few responses to make it happen. Maybe he hadn’t completely wrecked his career after all. 

Well, no, he definitely had, but with Venom in tow Eddie might yet be able to bring it back from the dead. 

After that, Eddie logged into his FaceBook account, sent Anne a friend request, and used her profile to find Dan’s and do the same for him. Then Eddie had to answer all the messages from panicked friends, acquaintances, and distant family members with whom he was still on speaking terms, saying they’d seen on the news that he was missing, presumed dead, and his place had been wrecked. 

The messages had seemed overwhelming in quantity while on Dan’s computer, but on Eddie’s own laptop, there turned out to be fewer than he’d realized. Way fewer. Enough that answering all of them started to seem like a dispiriting reminder of how few allies Eddie had left after the last six months of downward spiral. 

So Eddie snapped the laptop shut and went to go check the fridge. 

That turned out to be a horrorshow of the highest caliber. The doors had come open during the fighting, or Eddie himself had left them open in his fever, and most of the contents had rotted. Which probably explained some of the smell in here. Even beyond just the fridge, Eddie had ordered groceries online the day before the fight and they’d arrived right before the hit squad had. He had meant to put then away after making himself some tater tots, but he had never gotten the chance, and now they were still in their brown bags on the countertop. 

The bottom of one of them had dissolved onto the linoleum, brown sludge spreading out in a pool around it. 

Eddie got out a garbage bag and started throwing things into it, but then he reached his hot sauces and beer in the fridge. Did beer or sriracha go bad without refrigeration? It seemed like they shouldn’t, but he wasn’t sure. 

To be safe, he looked it up online. Half an hour later, having checked out the publication he might soon be working for, Eddie realized he was hungry, so he dug out his cell phone and ordered delivery. Beer and sriracha, both of which were apparently still okay to consume despite their lapse into room temperature, had made him crave Chinese food. 

Which was when he remembered the fridge again. He dumped the rest of its foul contents into the bag he’d started and hauled that down to the trash. That at least took care of some of the smell. 

But not all of it. His first thought was to open a window, until he realized that one of the windows had been smashed during the fight and was thus already letting in not only fresh air but also bugs and dust and a few leaves. 

Eddie went back to his computer to file a work order with the management company. Then he checked his email again to see if his old boss had responded, which he had, and FaceBook messenger pinged with messages. 

The countertops. Right. 

When he went over to the sink to get the surface cleaner out from underneath it, Eddie realized how thirsty he was. Most of the glasses were broken, probably because Venom had slammed someone’s body into the cupboards and knocked the contents out. But Eddie managed to find a surviving cup. 

By the time the food arrived, Eddie looked at his still-awful apartment and realized he should probably just ask for help. Left to his own devices he’d managed to clean the apartment maybe twice in the six months he’d lived here, both times haphazard and partial. But when Eddie sat down on a comparatively-clean area of the bed with his packages of take-out and imagined asking Anne for _this,_ now, when he already needed to talk to her about last night and he already knew how much Anne would hate this place...Eddie just couldn’t do it. 

He texted Dan instead. 

>> _Got my apartment back,_ he tapped out with his thumbs. _> >That means I can be out of your hair now. _

Several minutes passed before Eddie got a response. 

_ >>Oh, _ Dan replied after a moment, and then the texting app showed the “...” of Dan typing. Several instances of it disappearing and reappearing passed, as though Dan was thinking carefully about his answer. Finally it came. 

>> _I was looking forward to seeing you tonight. When will I see you again?_

Eddie stared at the words.

 **He wants us. We should fuck him,** Venom supplied. Which might, Eddie had to admit, actually be true, despite how shocking the idea still seemed. But that didn’t help Eddie know how to respond. He couldn’t invite Dan here, and the idea of going back over to Dan’s place for another night seemed like admitting defeat. 

Apparently Eddie sat paralyzed over his phone for long enough that Venom decided he’d had enough. So Eddie found his left thumb tapping the capitalization button twice, and then both hands were off to the races.

_ >>OUR APARTMENT IS TERRIBLE AND EDDIE WON’T LET ME EAT THE MESS. INSTEAD HE IS STUCK ON HOW BAD IT IS. _

“Goddammit Venom,” Eddie hissed, rolling his eyes. Somehow the fact that Venom could text weirded Eddie out. It made sense that he could, he could do anything Eddie could do. Yet some part of Eddie’s brain rebelled against the idea that a gelatinous alien ooze knew how to send text messages. 

_ >>Oh, haha. That sounds stressful, _ Dan replied. 

_ >>YOU SEEM FUNCTIONAL IN THIS REGARD, WHAT DO YOU ADVISE _ Venom typed out. 

“You are so fucking rude,” Eddie sighed. He wanted to protest that he was perfectly functional in every regard, thank you very much...yet here he was, sitting in his shitty apartment with takeout because he couldn’t cook, and even if he could, he couldn’t do it in this trashed space, which he didn't know how to clean. 

_ >>Why won’t Eddie let you eat the mess? _

**Yeah, why won’t you,** Venom asked, this time dripping sarcasm rather than his usual saliva. 

“Because the idea of having dust bunnies and smashed furniture inside my body is fucking gross!” Eddie exclaimed, feeling like this should have been obvious. But then, why should it have been? Venom wasn’t human. That _kept_ being the truth over and over again in every situation, no matter how helpful or relatable some of Venom’s other responses were. 

**All of it is made of star-matter anyway,** Venom explained, as though this were obvious. **And you are mostly made of the same chemical compounds as the stuff in here. I don’t see why you care. It wouldn’t stay as dust-bunnies or smashed furniture for more than a few seconds anyway.**

Making a face, Eddie glared at his screen, where neither of them had yet typed a response to Dan. 

Finally he let out a breath, admitting defeat. 

_ >>I’m just being stupid, _ he sent. _ >>I’ll let Venom help me. _

_ >>Let me know how it tastes! _ came the simultaneously irksome and charming response. Eddie bit his lip, wanting to both make out with Dan and punch him at the same time. 

“Seriously though, please don’t just eat everything I own,” Eddie clarified. “Just...eat the mess.”

**No problem. I will to need to excrete some of this, though, or we’ll end up with an excess of biomass. Your body can only contain so much matter before you start breaking the furniture and I have to make you bigger.**

“Yeah let’s not do that.”

Venom took over. It was like sinking into a hot bath, every crevice and hair touched all at once as they towered toward the ceiling. Eating those men last night had been so, so good for them. 

First went the remnants of the coffee table, swept up into an extruded moving pool of Venom’s body. From there Venom spread across the rest of the floor, vanishing the broken glass and crumbs and dust. 

For Eddie, buried inside while this occurred, it was a strange experience. He could feel the tiny micropodia of Venom’s biomass walking over the surfaces and sticking to everything they encountered. He could feel the way the materials were taken into their flesh and disassembled, immediately dispersed throughout their form. And he could...well, there was no human word for it really, but the closest approximation was to say that he could _taste_ all of this happening, in a way he knew was nothing like how any of it would taste to his human tongue. He expected the floor to taste bad but it didn’t. The chemical compounds didn’t register in anything like that way to Venom. It was more like the way Eddie's brain didn’t naturally recoil from blue and salivate over yellow even if he preferred looking at some colors more than others. 

Then came the cupboards. Most of their contents were a loss; a few rare items of ceramic and glass had survived, but that was all. Venom swept all of it into their body, and as their mass passed through the space, set the whole ones back upright, now probably cleaner than they had ever been since their creation. The counters and crushed remnants of Eddie's (few) spice jars and the shelf they’d been on met the same fate.

Eddie had to stop Venom from putting a limb down the sink, because that was just too much for Eddie to deal with. 

At this point, Venom shifted a little, pulling their mass back into the large humanoid shape they took with Eddie. Eddie felt the excess matter being clustered in their chest somewhere, and after a moment a perfectly smooth egg-like grey object dropped from their sternum into one of their hands. It was very dense, weighing heavily on their palm. Eddie knew, in the strange way Venom knew things, that it was most of the coffee table and flatware, minus a few elements and chemicals that Venom needed. 

_Is that really how you poop?_ Eddie asked. He didn’t know what he’d imagined, but this wasn’t it. 

**“The way you poop is a lot more exciting,”** Venom confirmed, and Eddie couldn’t help but laugh. Defecation had never been his kink, but he supposed that to an alien with no defined anus it might be of greater interest. 

Next Venom stepped over to the fridge. Even with most of the contents gone, it wasn’t what anyone would call clean. So dried spills and crumbs and fallen bits of lettuce vanished into their body just as quickly as everything else. 

After that it was the work of a few moments to haul the furniture back into the arrangement Eddie favored. If Venom snuck a few limbs into the crevices of the couch to get at the dust and spare change, well...Eddie couldn’t exactly blame him. The copper in the pennies was especially pleasant as it spread through their being. 

By the time they finished the rest of the apartment, they wound up with another, smaller egg-thing of excess matter. Eddie set it by the sink alongside the first one, inexplicably proud of them. _Was that gross?_ he wondered.

The last remaining thing to do seemed obvious. 

_ >>It tasted a little like how a blue-purple plaid looks? Sort of? _ Eddie sent to Dan. _ >>Also do you want a stoney egg thing made of my apartment’s Venom poop _

_ >>Absolutely! _ came the immediate reply. 

**We need to fuck that man as soon as possible,** Venom stated with urgency, and Eddie couldn’t help but agree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mari Kondo your life by eating all the things you don't use or like anymore


	8. Good Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, at long last!! This fic is done. Happy Yule, everyone, this finished fic is a gift to both myself and you.

Three days passed before Anne had the time and energy after work to see Eddie again. She requested that they go out to dinner at the Burmese place she liked, and as was usual for Eddie, he followed her lead. 

Seated in a corner of the restaurant, in a dim little area where most of the occupants of the other tables couldn’t see her, Anne braced herself to see Eddie again, gripping her hands in her lap to keep them away from her face and scalp. She hated that she needed to brace herself. She hated that on some level, Eddie probably needed to as well. 

This wasn’t as simple as either of them had wanted. Neither of them got to just forget how badly Eddie had hurt her. With time, she believed they’d both accept it and move on because there would be enough new and better experiences between them to bury their awful breakup beneath it. But that time hadn’t passed and the new experiences hadn’t accumulated yet. 

She loved Dan. It was still new and exciting to be able to say that to him, and to hear it in return. And when she’d met him, she had been fully prepared to never see Eddie again. But during her four months with Dan she had never really forgotten how much she missed having the kind of relationship she had with Eddie. Having the kinds of control Eddie gave her, not to mention the kinds of sex they’d had, had been a vital and wonderful part of her life for more than two years, and now that Eddie had come back into her life...she very much wanted that again. 

It felt like cheating on Dan to even let herself think it, but she could not help comparing them to each other, picking over the ways they each did or didn’t meet her needs. She did it in the same way she might use her tongue to probe a ragged, bleeding place she’d bitten through her own lip. It hurt and was a little gross but she couldn’t leave it alone. 

In the last week she had asked herself over and over again if what she was doing was wrong. Was she leading one or both of them on? Did she secretly prefer one over the other? 

The articles Eddie had found for them suggested that many people had what was called primary and secondary partners. Anne had wondered if, perhaps, either Eddie or Dan might end up as a secondary rather than primary partner. 

But she didn’t think that was how they would work. She had been engaged to Eddie. She could easily see herself getting engaged to Dan someday. They were both central, meaningful relationships. 

Was she _allowed_ to have two?

Or was it three? Because Venom was absolutely in the mix too. 

He frightened her, not least because of how good it had felt to _be_ Venom, for the short while they had shared a body. It was how she had felt during her best moments with Eddie: strong, powerful, potent, dangerous, _hungry._ Venom had made her want to eat men alive, and Eddie had always loved her best when she took what she wanted from him. 

Dan, meanwhile, relaxed her just by being who he was. His earnestness and the soft honesty of his worldview never got less appealing. Indeed, she thought that if she didn’t marry him someday, he’d have well and truly spoiled her for anyone else. She never wanted to go through the confusion and anxiety and mixed signals of dating anyone else ever again. The only reason she was willing to try anything with Eddie was that they already knew each other so well. 

If Eddie was a spicy meal, Dan was a warm bath. Two very different experiences of satisfaction and luxury--and heat. So when Anne asked herself which she would prefer to have for the rest of her life if she had to choose one, the answer kept being “But I want both.”

Which she apparently got to have. And which no one could actually _stop_ her from having, not even her family! Except for how nonmonogamy would never otherwise have been her choice. She had never wanted it before, because she hated the idea of her partner’s attention being divided away from her, and of being compared to someone else the way she couldn’t help but compare Eddie and Dan. The thought of Eddie (or Dan) comparing her to either of them made her feel sick and furious. But she couldn’t have what she wanted without letting them have what they wanted too.

That thought brought her fingers up to the bald patch at the back of her skull to pull and pull and pull. 

She had never expected that getting everything she wanted would feel this stressful. 

Eddie walked in wearing a leather jacket and tight jeans, making a beeline from the front of the restaurant directly for her despite her concealed position. He was obviously packing, and the sight of it curled up one side of her mouth, knowing he only packed when he was feeling either anxious or sexy. 

For this date it was probably both. 

“Hey, babe,” he greeted her, smiling his crooked grin at her before leaning down to give her a warm, lingering kiss. 

When the waiter arrived Anne held Eddie’s gaze for a moment to check in, then ordered for them both. He let her, a beatific look on his face like this was everything he wanted. Maybe it was? She hoped it was. 

When the prosaic life update portion of the conversation was over, Eddie shifted around in his chair, looking distant in the way he did when Venom was talking to him. He continued pulling apart his paper napkin, tearing off strips and rolling them between his fingers. He already had an almost tidy little pile of them beside his fork. 

“So, uh, look. The other night, when you tied me up.”

His posture and tone of voice betrayed his anxiety about whatever he was about to say, and an unnamed something tensed up in Anne’s gut in response, anticipating judgment or loss. But she just raised an eyebrow and nodded at him to continue. It couldn’t be anything too bad, surely? Not with the way he’d kissed her in greeting. 

Eddie looked all around the room, leg jigging so hard that it shook the table. “I know I never used to need much aftercare except for the really extreme scenes. But that was when we were, y’know. Exclusive.”

Understanding dawned, and with it an intense need to pluck. The muscles of her right shoulder hurt with the tension of keeping her arm down. In the hopes of relieving the discomfort, she leaned back in her seat, hands folded neatly on the tablecloth. From the outside she probably looked calm, which was the point. 

“I know you probably didn’t mean anything by it, but it really sucked knowing you were going off to fuck Dan when I was in subspace for you for the first time in half a year. Before--” Eddie waved one hand, perhaps indicating the last six months, or the near-death experiences, or Venom, or Dan, or all of those things together, “--everything, it would have been fine. And I think even if you got me in subspace and then went to work or something, I wouldn’t have thought twice. But I’ve never had to cope with knowing my girlfriend is fucking some other guy down the hall while I’m still tied up in her living room, and I don’t really want to have to do that again.”

“Are you saying you don’t want me sleeping with Dan?” she asked, and knew at once it was the wrong thing to say. But the lawyer’s instinct to admit nothing and redirect questions or demands onto the other person was difficult to turn off when she was stressed. 

Given the unimpressed look Eddie gave her, he knew it too. “You _know_ that’s not what I’m fuckin’ saying. I’m--” he paused, staring past her for several seconds, and then nodded. Probably Venom again. This time when he tore off another piece of napkin, there was a little more force in his hands. “I get that I have a lot to make up for. I get it if you’re still mad at me or don’t trust me like you used to and that’s fair. But what’s between us isn’t about Dan, and I don’t want to start feeling like you’re punishing me by being with him, or that I have to keep my guard up while I’m in subspace for you. If you wanna tell me again how much of an asshole I was to you six months ago when it’s just you and me, fine, I probably deserve it. But leave that out of our play.”

All of Anne’s attention was focused on not touching her scalp, on staying still and keeping her expression unreadable. So it took her several seconds to find any words to respond. 

“None of that,” she gave a small twitch of two fingers, indicating what Eddie had just said, “was my intent the other night. I wasn’t thinking about any of that at all.”

Eddie’s shoulders thumped into the back of his own chair as he subsided, dropping the napkin and instead twisting his bracelets around his wrist before his hands disappeared under the table. His eyes dropped to the table cloth, lashes shadowing his cheeks and making his face look soft and vulnerable. 

“Yeah, I know,” he admitted. “I figured you weren’t. But that’s what it felt like, and what I couldn’t stop thinking about afterward.”

Anne forced herself to take a deep breath. Then a second one. She knew it was graceless and ugly of her to have such trouble with conversations like this. She knew she needed to actually apologize, to say the words ‘I’m sorry’ and not just imply she hadn’t meant to do anything wrong. She knew she didn’t get to judge Eddie for how bad _he_ had been at apologizing to her when she wasn’t any better. 

But there had been endless instances growing up in which she hadn’t been allowed to leave the room or do anything else until she apologized for engaging in her _disgusting habit_ yet again, or for whatever else she had done of which her parents disapproved. Often her parents had stopped what the entire family was doing and _everybody_ had stared at her until she confessed her failure and promised to do better next time. 

She startled when Eddie’s hand touched hers, one tentative finger caressing the backs of her knuckles. When she dragged her eyes up to his, she could see in his face that he knew exactly what she was remembering. He had met her family. He had seen them do it. 

She wanted to be the one in control, always, and so she hated and loved Eddie in equal measure for moments like this. Because this was how it had always been with Eddie: he needed her to take control and she did, until she stumbled into some problem she couldn’t have seen coming and he had to tell her to stop or do it differently, and then _he_ was suddenly the patient one, giving her the time she needed to force herself back into line. 

Looking at him looking back at her that way, the words came easier. 

“I’m sorry,” she got out at last. “That isn’t what I wanted either. I’ll bear that in mind next time.”

**

The sex they had that night might not have been the best they’d _ever_ had, but if so that was only because they’d had a lot of amazing sex during their years together. 

Eddie lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, still panting and shaking from his second climax. The insides of his thighs throbbed, bruised and covered in her palm prints, as another blurt of lube dripped out of him. 

The feeling of Venom poking the welts from the inside was new, but it got exactly the same shiver from Eddie as when Anne did it from the outside. 

**

The next afternoon, riding the double high of last night’s date with Annie and today’s job interview (which Eddie thought he’d aced), Eddie and Venom decided to burn off steam together. Which meant slamming the front door of their apartment behind them, fumbling his pants off, tripping over them when he forgot to take his shoes off first, Venom throwing said shoes across the room in his impatience, and Eddie falling onto the bed with some choice images in mind. 

The funny thing about polyamory, he was finding today, was that fucking Annie had made him even more curious about Dan. Dan was a great sexual mystery. They talked via text or chat every day, but the topic of sex had barely come up at all, and Anne (unlike Eddie himself) was far too classy to kiss and tell. Was Dan a top or a bottom or vers like Eddie himself? Was Dan a switch or a sub? What sorts of things was he into? 

Eddie knew he couldn’t just text Dan to say _‘_ _Hey I know we’ve only been dating for like a fortnight but please stop playing hard to get. How soon will you be ready to put out?’_ That kind of message was everything Eddie hated about other men, gross and pushy and entitled. But also...also both Eddie and Venom were desperate to fuck Dan. 

But! Eddie and Venom could both be respectful of Dan’s preferred pace of dating. So Eddie lay on his bed with his hand around his dick, yet again, imagining Dan’s long legs up around their shoulders. Which was when a thought occurred to Eddie. 

Pushing up onto his left elbow, Eddie stared critically down at his dick. Or Venom’s dick? He wasn’t sure exactly whose it was. Both of theirs, maybe.

Some trans guys Eddie had known had a very definite sense of how their dicks should be, regardless of what mother nature had actually provided them. Their mental maps of their bodies were quite specific on the subject. But while Eddie had always wanted a dick of a larger size and shape than his built-in one, he’d never actually let himself consider what the ‘right’ one would be. 

With strap-ons, he just wore whatever his partner wanted. He couldn’t feel the dildos anyway, so he’d never seen the point of getting emotionally attached to a particular model. But now...now he _could_ actually feel it, and he _did_ have a choice, and that changed things. 

At Eddie’s long pause, Venom surfaced, pooling along Eddie’s sternum and forming little white eyes that looked at him questioningly. 

“I’m just wondering what my dick should look like,” Eddie explained, hoping that would be enough. 

**Is this size not correct? It’s much smaller than the first time.**

That was true. Since then Venom had pared down their endowment to something far more average, partly because it was easier to jerk off when Eddie’s hand could cover more of the thing. He liked having the other hand free to play with his balls. 

“I don’t know,” Eddie replied. 

It was tempting just to direct Venom to make it look like what Eddie found attractive in other people’s dicks. But since it wasn’t ever going inside him, and the point of it wasn’t to _look_ pretty, doing that felt too much like dressing himself up with yet another strap-on. The point of the thing was to _feel_ right for him. 

The experimentation that followed was, if nothing else, a fun exercise in edging. Having Venom tweak the length, girth, head size, veininess, curvature, and foreskin quantity was all kinds of stimulating without ever being quite enough to get either of them off. 

Throughout, Eddie found his thoughts wandering to Dan. What did _Dan’s_ cock look like? 

By the time Eddie and Venom both gave up and just jerked off, Eddie still had no idea what the ‘right’ dick for him would be. But they had all the time in the world. There was no rush to figure it out and every reason to keep experimenting.

**

The really strange thing about Dan was that he seemed to get _more_ nervous with Eddie as time passed rather than less. 

Venom noticed it first. **His heart rate is elevated around you more often and at a higher pace than before,** Venom remarked while Eddie was over at Dan’s place one evening. Before Eddie could say that maybe this meant Dan now liked him more, Venom continued, **And his sweat is more acrid.**

Dan had just left to use the bathroom, so Eddie answered felt able to answer. “It is? Why?” 

**I don’t know why, which bothers me,** Venom replied. 

“Huh.”

The next date after that, one goodnight kiss in Dan’s doorway led to two, which led to Dan just opening his door and letting himself be pushed up against it from the inside as they made out.

Squirming, wrapping one hand a little tighter around Dan’s nape while the other hooked through the back of Dan’s belt, all the fantasies of the last few weeks rushed into Eddie’s mind: Dan’s long, shapely legs up over his shoulders, or wrapped around his waist. Dan with a cute little cock Eddie could fit into his mouth, the skin of it warm and soft on his tongue. Eddie on all fours, taking it from behind with Dan’s long, elegant hands stroking the head of Eddie’s dick. 

Dan’s breath was hot on Eddie’s cheek and Dan let out a little groan in the back of his throat, leaning further down to meet Eddie’s kisses. Dan’s thumbs stroked along the stubble at the corners of Eddie’s jaw.

Then Dan pulled away for a breath, looking down at Eddie with an unreadable expression. 

“Wow, okay. And now, goodnight, Eddie.”

Eddie and Venom both stared at him, excitement curdling into dismay in their belly.

“Did I do something wrong?” Eddie asked after a moment, trying (and failing) to keep a plaintive note out of his voice. “I mean, this seemed like it was going well until just now.”

Dan blinked at them before seeming to understand something. “Oh, you think I’m sending you away because I’m unhappy with you. No, that’s just enough for me for tonight.”

“It is?” Eddie replied before he could think. “Okay, well if it’s not _me_ doing something wrong, is there something _else_ wrong? Because--look, I don’t want to pressure you here, but usually when dating is going this well and then I get invited inside for make-outs, that leads to sex. But now instead you’re dismissing me at the door like I’m the UPS guy who’s already handed over my package. Uh, no pun intended.”

The unintentional double entendre got not even a hint of amusement from Dan, who just looked unhappy, shoulders rising as he crossed his arms over his belly. Eddie waited him out for what felt like an intolerably length of time, feeling like he was going to explode if he had to wait one more second--but the seconds just kept passing.

“I’m sorry. I’ve been avoiding this,” Dan admitted at long, long last. “I feel silly admitting it, it’s just--I wouldn’t be okay if you rejected me now.”

Eddie stared up at the taller man. He’d expected a whole variety of horrible responses--that Dan had realized that Eddie was unforgivable for what he’d done to Anne, Dan had realized that cannibalism was morally reprehensible and wanted nothing to do with it, or even that Dan was a bigot toward trans people--but _this_ hadn’t been even a remote contender for what Eddie had expected. 

“What?” he said, baffled. 

If anything, Dan looked even unhappier. His expressions were subtle, less in his face and more in his body. But his shoulders were very, very unhappy. 

“I didn’t expect to get this far with you,” Dan explained. “I thought by this point you’d have realized you just wanted Anne, and we’d talk about it and be just friends, and I’d deal with my feelings alone.”

“You thought I’d steal Anne from you?” Eddie said, even more stunned and confused by this answer. 

“No, I thought we’d both date her and I’d just deal with my crush on you by myself,” Dan clarified, while still not clarifying anything. Even Venom felt confused, letting out a nonverbal interrogative hum somewhere around Eddie’s hipbones.

“So what part of me making out with you after what seemed like a really nice date reads as me being about to reject you?” Eddie asked, trying to make any sense of Dan’s responses. “Because I’ll be honest, I’m _gagging_ for it over here. I didn’t think I could make that more clear.”

This somehow, made it even worse. Dan closed his eyes for a long moment, before opening them slowly and looking way away from Eddie. 

“Other people got to this point and then left me,” Dan said, in the saddest, most resigned voice possible. “I’m...not what people expect, in bed.”

Eddie couldn’t help the laugh that came out of him at this, because the possibility that this wouldn’t work out because of some issue with _Dan_ rather than Eddie himself seemed so ridiculous. 

“Look, whether you’re vanilla or into some really freaky shit, we’ll make it work, okay? I’m flexible, especially now I’ve got Venom in here.” A new thought occurred to Eddie then. “And look, if you’ve got a small dick, or you come fast, or have trouble getting hard, I’m not gonna flip out about that either. Okay? We’ll figure it out.”

Dan didn’t look relieved. But then, Eddie thought, depending on what the problem was, Dan might not be _able_ to believe things were okay between them until Eddie proved he meant it, which Eddie was happy to do. As often as possible. In as many positions as possible. 

“Okay,” Dan agreed, and Eddie suppressed the impulse to do a fist-pump. “I’d like it if we had sex. Just...please don’t be mean to me, okay?”

“That’s not my kink, so no problem,” Eddie replied, with complete honesty, and then followed Dan to his bedroom.

**

The first time Dan put his hand down Eddie’s pants, Dan almost came on the spot. The tip of Eddie’s dick caught on the lines in the center of Dan’s palm, just long enough to push out beyond the rest of Eddie’s sex. That firm little shape, combined with the wetness that greeted Dan’s fingertips, almost did him in. Eddie Brock’s body responding to _him!_ This was _really happening!_

Burying his face in Eddie’s neck as Dan traced the top of the other man’s cock, Dan tried to drown out both the piercing noise of the sirens down the street and the voice in Dan’s head that whispered that it would be _better_ if Dan just came in his pants. That way Eddie wouldn’t have to see Dan naked. Which meant that Dan could have at least one instance of sex with Eddie Brock before being absolutely crushed by his rejection. 

A more rational part of Dan’s mind thought that this was unlikely, especially given what Eddie had said in the hall, but the rest of Dan was terrified. 

Having a crush on Eddie as a face on a screen had been safe. Flirting with Eddie and going on dates with him had been wonderful, and still fairly safe, because Dan figured if they’d stopped there, they could still be friends. But now Eddie was here, in Dan’s bed, with his soft plump mouth and crooked teeth and the sole of his foot warm against Dan’s calf, waiting for Dan to make himself vulnerable--and that was way more terrifying than an unrequited crush.

Sex with Anne went pretty well, Dan thought. Dan knew he was more vanilla than Anne liked or was used to after Eddie, but they’d figured out ways to be together that worked for them both. But that was just it: Anne was the first sexual partner Dan had slept with in close to five years, and when he had started sleeping with Anne, it had been “practice.” Anne had said she wasn’t sure she was ready or interested in anything but a casual sexual relationship, and Dan had taken her at her word and not let himself get attached until things were already working out between them. And it helped that the things she liked in bed mostly sidestepped the problem. 

With his work slacks and underwear still on it was still safe. Dan still had a little longer to feel how badly Eddie seemed to want him. 

But then Eddie grabbed Dan’s wrist, stilling it where it was trapped down the front of his jeans. “You okay, babe?” Eddie asked, which was when Dan realized he must have given away his discomfort without realizing it. Yet again. Maybe he had kept his forehead pressed against Eddie’s collarbone for too long. 

He pulled away from Eddie, shuffling over to the side of the bed so he didn’t have to look at the other man’s face. 

“I think it’s easiest if I just show you,” Dan sighed. 

Even the little clinking noises of Dan’s belt buckle and the rasp of his zipper grated on him now. Anxiety made overstimulation worse, and he got more overstimulated the more anxious he was. Which just made it even worse still--now was _not_ a good time to have a meltdown. Not that there was ever a good time, but especially not now.

With almost a flourish of despair, Dan shucked his pants, stepped out of them, and turned around to face Eddie. 

Eddie’s eyes zeroed right in on the problem. For a second he just looked at it, not seeming to understand, and then his eyebrows went up. 

“Huh,” he said, and then pushed himself up onto his hands to lean forward and get a better look. With a cautious hand, pausing before he made contact as if waiting to be rejected himself, Eddie wrapped two fingers around the side of Dan’s erection closest to his body. Eddie just held it as he visually took it in. 

While both standing and hard, as Dan was now, his penis curved so sharply to the left that the glans almost touched his hipbone. And it wasn’t just hooked to the side, either; the frenulum, which on most men would be facing the ground in this position, was turned outward away from Dan’s body and pointed right toward Eddie. 

“Okay, so that’s a little unusual to look at,” Eddie said, cheeks still pinked. “Are you just self-conscious about the way it looks?”

“No,” Dan sighed. As if he would care this much if it was just an issue of appearance. “It’s not...usable, in the way most people expect. Trying to put it in anyone is painful, to the extent that I can’t stay hard.”

“Oh!” Eddie blinked, running his thumb along the side of Dan’s erection. Dan’s traitorous dick twitched, and Eddie looked intrigued. But then, people were always intrigued by the sight of an interesting specimen. That didn’t necessarily mean they wanted anything further to do with it. 

The siren down the street had been replaced by the howling of the next-door neighbor’s dog. Dan desperately wished the animal would quiet down, as every noise it made felt like it was digging into the surface of Dan’s brain. 

“Are you going to leave now?” Dan asked, eager to just get this over with if so.

Letting out a derisive snort, Eddie climbed up onto his knees, wrapping his arms around Dan’s neck. 

“Really? You think that’s where this is leading? Look, maybe I can’t just sit on your dick to prove my interest. But I can suck your balls if you want. Or top you. Or whatever you want.”

Dan stared at Eddie. Part of Dan’s mind said that of course Eddie would respond this way, he was a good guy even if he had some impulse control issues, and Dan wouldn’t have developed as many feelings for Eddie if he were less of a good person. The rest of Dan still didn’t think any of this was real, because handsome celebrities did not end up in bed with Dan. It just didn’t happen. 

Dan had thought he’d feel better knowing that Eddie really wanted him, but instead Dan just felt exhausted, overwhelmed and oversensitive and on the edge of crying. Eddie looked concerned when Dan unwrapped Eddie’s arms from around his neck, clearly worried that Dan would try again to send him home. But Dan just seated himself on the edge of the bed, unable to stay standing anymore. 

At least his erection was wilting, making itself less obvious. It didn’t help that his dick was larger than average, thus accentuating its inaccessibility.

“Sorry,” Dan apologized, in a low voice. Dan squeezed his eyes shut--he was ruining this evening a whole new way now, wasn’t he? “Sorry. I’m just--I’ve been so anxious. And I’m overstimulated. Normally when I get like this I shut myself in a dark room. But we’re supposed to be having sex.”

“Hey,” Eddie said, hovering by Dan’s side. “It’s okay. I mean, realistically I’ll still be horny for you in an hour. Or a day. Or whatever.”

 **“Do you want help with the noise?”** Venom asked then. 

Startled by the offer, Dan blinked. He turned to look at Eddie, whose teeth were longer and more plentiful than usual, filling his soft lips as Venom partially took over. The sight of it was so intriguing (where did the teeth _go_ when Venom retreated? Did he somehow alter the structure of Eddie’s existing dentition? Did new teeth grow out of Eddie’s gums? If so, where did Eddie’s usual teeth go while that happened?) that for a few seconds Dan almost stopped feeling bad. 

“What do you mean?” Dan forced out at last. Words got harder the more overstimulated Dan got. 

**“You wear earplugs when the noise sensitivity is heightened,”** Venom remarked, and Dan remembered then that he’d forgotten to take his plugs out several times coming home from work. The fluorescent lights at the hospital made an intolerable sound, as did all the machines and the air conditioners and everything else. **“I could be much better than the silicone things you wear.”**

For a moment, Dan leaned forward, already longing for it--and then a flood of his other fears rushed to ruin the moment still further. He curled down over his knees, trying to focus on his heartbeat so he didn’t panic. It was so difficult when he could smell Eddie’s sex in the room--they'd gotten naked, Eddie hadn't freaked out, and now Dan was ruining his chances even after all that. 

The words Dan needed to use to explain himself wouldn’t come. They wouldn’t come and they wouldn’t come. 

“Hey, uh, you don’t seem like you’re doing great,” Eddie stated, sounding anxious too now. Fuck. “I’m gonna just, y’know, hold you till you calm down? If you don’t like it, feel free to shove me off I guess.”

Dan didn’t want Eddie to leave. He just wanted the world to stop being so difficult and so much and so loud. The neighbor’s dog had stopped barking and settled into a miserable protracted howl that suggested it was unhappy at someone’s departure. It sawed against the bare surface of Dan’s mind. 

Eddie wrapped around Dan’s back and Venom flicked off the lights from across the room. They stayed there for what felt like a long time, until the dog finally went quiet and Dan’s heart slowed down. 

“I apologize,” Dan said at last, when he could make language again. “I didn’t think it would be this difficult.”

 **“Offer still stands,”** Venom replied, and Dan’s heart rate jumped and something in his chest suddenly hurt again. **“Or not?”** Venom added, as though he could tell. Maybe he could. 

“You wouldn’t--” Dan swallowed, forcing the words out. “You wouldn’t go inside me at all, would you?”

 **“I was just offering to cover your ears,”** Venom replied, sounding confused. **“We don’t have to fuck if you don’t want.”**

“No, I mean-- _penetrating_ me would be just fine, when I’m in a better state. I mean you wouldn’t _suffuse_ me like you do with Eddie.”

 **“This isn’t an emergency, so I’d ask first,”** Venom replied, sounding even more perplexed now, and maybe a little hurt. **“If you hate the idea so much--”**

“No,” Dan interrupted. “I'm intrigued. It’s just--you could probably fix my penis for me, which is overwhelming enough as a concept. I’ve thought about it a lot since seeing what you did to Eddie’s chest. But I don’t want you fixing _anything_ without asking first, and there are some things I don't want you trying to fix at all.” 

**“You have some other health problem? I didn’t know,”** Venom said, and Eddie’s arm slid down Dan’s back as he withdrew.

Dan winced. “You said you wanted to...to be inside me. I think you were flirting with me when you said it, but...but I’m worried that...” Even the thought made him nauseated but Dan forced himself to shape the words. “My whole life people have wanted me to be different. Specifically my brain, because I’m autistic. But I think I'm okay the way I am and I don't want to know if it's something you can change. I especially don't want to find out that you _want_ to.”

Dan heard Eddie inhale sharply, or maybe that was still Venom. Eddie’s hand, soft and human, flattened on Dan’s back between his shoulder blades. Dan liked it very much because it meant Eddie was still here, somehow. 

**“I do not believe I would find anything to fix,”** Venom said, finally.

At this, Dan turned to look at them again. Eddie’s eyes were a glossy, opalescent white, irises and pupils smoothed away by Venom’s presence. But aside from the eyes and teeth, Eddie’s face remained otherwise human. 

Dan knew that being autistic was fine, so Venom’s response didn't herald the arrival of some new and unfathomable information...and yet. And yet Dan realized now that his fear of Venom or Eddie thinking there was something wrong with him, and worse still wanting to change it, had held Dan back from the relationship just as much as his fear of Eddie’s reaction to Dan’s body. Having both fears cleared away at once left a wild, overwhelming sense of relief. Dan could barely breathe.

Eddie Brock’s face, partially alien and all attentive to Dan’s feelings, was one of the most attractive sights Dan had ever seen. He was so in love. 

“I like you very, very much,” Dan admitted, unwilling to use the other L-word yet lest it scare someone away. "Both of you, Eddie and Venom." Dan leaned across the small distance to press their mouths together.

A deep rumble of approval, more felt than heard, rewarded his boldness. When Dan withdrew it was with a smile.

“I would like it if Eddie cuddled me for a while and you took care of the noise. Once I’m calmer, we can have sex.”

After that, Dan got everything he wanted. One of Eddie’s legs pushed up between Dan’s from behind as they curled together on the bed, warm and cosy beneath the blankets. Venom flowed forward around the sides of Dan’s skull, somehow both sticky and dry at the same time as he spread over Dan’s ears. And then blessed silence fell, the outside world completely cut away, leaving only the familiar, predictable noises inside Dan’s own body. 

Dan listened to his breathing, his heartbeat, the wet noises as he swallowed. He relaxed into Eddie’s arms, softening into the bed like butter melting into a pan. Even Eddie seemed calm. 

When Dan finally turned over, some unnamed length of time later, Venom flowed with him. Dan kept his eyes closed. From the outside, the black ooze connecting his head to Eddie’s would probably look horrifying, so Dan didn’t want to see it. It felt too nice to ruin it with appearances. 

So he found Eddie’s mouth by feel. They kissed lazily and then not-so-lazily as Eddie’s hands wandered up Dan’s back. 

Venom withdrew partially from one of Dan’s ears to purr into it, **“So you might not be able to fuck humans with that dick, but you can fuck** **_me_** **. I could even make Eddie come from it.** ”

“You--oh my god,” Dan breathed, a tingle of shock running down his spine. He had been struggling to figure out what he wanted tonight, overwhelmed by all the potential options, but this one eclipsed all the others because of its newness. “Oh my god you _could,_ couldn’t you, we could--we could do that!” 

Which was how Dan wound up on his back with Venom’s massive jet-black form kneeling over his hips. Dan had never seen Eddie and Venom like this before. He’d seen Venom piecemeal, little bits of of him extruding from Eddie’s limbs or face. And while Anne had described the complete takeover to Dan, seeing it was something else. 

Getting hard again proved easy when faced with a colossal, smug alien. Dan was learning new things about himself every day! But Dan nonetheless stopped Venom with a hand on the massive, inhumanly smooth chest. 

“You’re really hot like that, but I’d like to be able to see Eddie,” Dan told them gently. “Is this what he wants too?”

Venom grinned, a sight Dan was well aware would make other men piss themselves. Then the teeth curled open and away like the tendrils of an anemone when it felt safe, baring Eddie’s face inside the monstrous maw. 

A hectic pink flushed Eddie’s cheeks and he looked just as smitten as Dan felt. 

“Look, buddy, if I were any more excited to find out how it’s gonna feel to have Venom take your dick, I’d be coming right now,” Eddie admitted, oversized hands smoothing down Dan’s sides. “I should probably be embarrassed admitting that, but take it as flattery.”

Dan squirmed, blushing himself. The head of his dick rubbed wetly against his left hip. 

“Okay,” Dan agreed with a smile. “Okay, let’s have an adventure.”

Venom sank down over him and Dan’s cock disappeared between those thick thighs. It was like being grasped all over, Venom completely _enveloping_ Dan from glans to taint, balls and all. Gasping, Dan shivered and clutched at the blankets as the sudden heat twisted all around him, swirling and eddying in a way that was _nothing_ like any human orifice. A low rumble on the edge of human hearing buzzed through Dan’s bones, perhaps indicating Venom’s own pleasure. 

“Oh,” Dan whimpered. “Oh my.”

Eddie’s eyes fluttered shut inside the framing circle of teeth.

“Fuck, he’s--I can’t even describe how this feels,” Eddie gritted out, voice shaking. “Goddamn, Venom, you sly bitch, I didn’t know you could do that--”

Dan had been forced early in his teen years to train himself out of rocking his hips or thrusting when aroused, because frotting up against anything hurt, pulling taut on the tissues inside his cock to the point where it always felt like something was about to tear. But fucking up against Venom did nothing but demonstrate how helpless Dan was. Venom pulsed around Dan at a pace which had no relationship to how Dan did or didn’t move. 

The sex that followed this was, Dan realized afterward, quite short. But he didn’t think any of them minded. No one needed to be impressed by a display of stamina--or rather, anyone who needed to be impressed already was, since Dan and Eddie both seemed overwhelmed and Venom gave every appearance of having a grand time, insofar as Dan could interpret anything Venom did. 

Eddie and Venom came first, teeth sealing closed over Eddie’s face in an ecstatic growl as the rest of Venom shimmered and spasmed over Dan, who stared at the spectacle in awe. 

Then, of course, Dan came too, because really what else was he supposed to do?

When Dan returned to coherency, he found a naked and fully-human Eddie grinning down at him and no mess to clean up. (He had come inside Venom, and unlike anyone with a static orifice, there was nowhere for it to dribble back out. The knowledge that a little bit of Dan's own genetic material was now part of Venom’s biomass was romantic in its own way.)

“That was amazing,” Eddie enthused, bending down to kiss Dan again. “You’re amazing,” he said between more kisses. _“We’re_ amazing. You and me and Venom, and Annie--all four of us being together is amazing!”

“We do seem to be a good match for each other,” Dan agreed, delighted all over again that it seemed to be true. 

**

The amazing thing wasn't just that incident of sex, Eddie found. (It was succeeded, shortly after, by another round of sex that was just as good, in which Eddie got to try out his and Venom's dick with a partner. Turned out, fucking someone with it was every bit as good as Eddie could have hoped, and Dan was every bit as into it as Eddie had fantasized.) The amazing thing wasn't even the next day when they went on a movie date together with Anne, all four of them enjoying themselves when they found a film with enough romance and explosions to interest Venom. 

The amazing thing was that they _worked_ together. It took effort--Annie was insecure about Eddie and Dan sleeping with each other, and couldn't decide if she wanted all the details or none of them. And coordinating the schedules of three working adults was difficult when none of then lived together yet. But while Eddie and Venom might have been a one in a million genetic match, the four of them together--Eddie was prepared to believe that truly was a one-in-a-billion match. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Penis curvature like Dan has is a real thing called Peyronie's Disease, also known as penile fibrosis. It occurs when fibrous scar tissue builds up in part of the corpus cavernosum and doesn't heal correctly or stretch over time. No one is certain what causes it, but some people theorize that trauma to the penis (such as getting kicked in the groin, or even possibly circumcision) may cause it. Having some curvature to the penis isn't uncommon, but it's rare that it's so intense that it interferes with sexual activity. Dan's dick in particular is based on a guy I knew when I was younger. 
> 
> I'm not 100% sure how I feel about the final lines of this. I always struggle with ending my fics. But I hope everyone has enjoyed reading! Please comment if you did. :)


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